Vervet females better teachers

Not an april fool's story:
 When vervet monkeys play follow the leader, they prefer to follow a female. That was the conclusion of Erica van de Waal, whose lengthy study of these primates in South Africa will be published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. When her team presented them with a tricky contraption they had to open to reach a tasty snack, the monkeys learned better if they watched a female from their group demonstrate the solution rather than a male.
Seeking some answers to how social learning works in monkeys, van de Waal and her colleagues headed to Loskop Dam Nature Reserve.
The scientists saw that other monkeys paid more attention when the dominant female was solving the puzzle as opposed to the dominant male. Later, the team passed out the same kind of box to other members of the groups. If those monkeys were among the groups that had watched the male, they didn’t show a preference for which side of the box to open, which suggested they hadn’t learned much during their spectating days. In fact, van de Waal says, they didn’t even show a preference toward attempting to open the box. But, in the groups that watched their dominant female, 80 percent went for the side of the container they’d seen her open before.
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Developing minds

Lots of cool news came out recently about human development, from chimps to little humans:

Wild chimps have been shown to understand fire and how it moves, and don't freak out like other animals do. This is exciting because humans so far had been the only animals documented as keeping their cool around fire...for the most part.

Since we're in the jungle, it's once again been show that it's good for kids to go roll around in the dirt; for one thing it correlates with lower heart disease when they're older.

But back to brain wiring, kids who get intensive language training when they're young, like reading, actually have their brains re-wired, in a good way.

New education research is also showing that kids may understand Math at a much earlier age than previously though, and there are ways that they can learn the concepts just as early as we try to teach them language.

One of the skills kids can develop is compartmentalization, which it turns out cavemen could also do much earlier than previously thought; for example, they made different, compartmentalized work stations in their camps, rather than spread everything around and sleep right next to the meat-processing spot.

Speaking of stone-age types, a study has come out that counters the idea that hunter-gatherers didn't eat any grains at all.

All this data almost makes me want to grab some popcorn and pop it over a fire while playing math games. But not before I go work in my garden patch.

Gesturing builds brains

If anyone has ever made fun of you for using your hands a lot while you talk, you can just tell them about this new research that shows gesturing builds more connections in brain, making you overall better-wired, i.e. smarter.

From the article:
"The authors [of the research] suggest that students who also gestured attempted to make sense of both the speech and gesture in a way that brought the two meanings together...The study also has more practical implications for teaching, suggesting that teachers can help students learn new concepts by teaching them gestures."

Woot! I’m connected! *waves arms in excitement*

Who cares

This thought process originally started with me feeling sorry for myself, but then it lead to a really interesting question:

I'm fascinated with the things I've been learning and studying lately about play and all the different tendrils it has in other elements of human life, otherwise I wouldn't be pursuing it. And obviously somebody cared enough to study it and write about it, and somebody at a publishing company thought it was worth publishing. But who really cares about this stuff?

Honestly.

I don't mean that as a sarcastic or rhetoric question. I mean, who else in the world is interested in how humans play with each other and how it effects their lives, how they work, how they love, how they are seen by society and how play lets them try on other roles and grow skills. What about how humans play with themselves (and I don't mean that in a dirty way), and what kind of learning do we do while playing versus while studying or memorizing.

This of course leads to the more general question of what is worth studying, and why? Why are certain seemingly insignificant things given millions of dollars for research while other equally insignificant things aren't? How and why do we place value on knowledge? What is the process? And the difference between what's considered important knowledge by the public versus the government or the military or academics.

All of this is a bit existential, but my point is there is reasoning behind why we value knowledge, and which bits of knowledge, and certain types of knowledge. Even if it doesn't seem like it. And while I'm certainly not going to try and tackle that particular question, and it's important to me to ask about the knowledge I'm going after and what its applications are in the bigger scheme of things, i.e. would other people even care.

Modern Views on Parenting

Granted I’ve learned you can’t taking anything too seriously in grocery store magazines (just look at how TIME handled parkour), but Newsweek came out today with two editorials that are actually quite good at analyzing how men and women’s roles in parenting have evolved over the course of a generation or two and what expectations are compared to real life, and I found myself agreeing with both perspectives.

A mom's perspective: When I read this my first thought was, “dear god, this is my future.”
A dad's perspective: The third paragraph summarizes his whole point.

Of course this is all totally a modern Western view. So many other groups would think the parents are making too big a deal of their own situations, and from all scemas. Too much energy spent on the kids, not enough energy, etc. However, being a modern Western woman who plans on having kids someday, I am personally pleased that my culture is still talking and thinking about this and things are moving in this direction. Not just for my own sanity, but for the well being of my future children. I found the statistic in the dad’s article about dads in the 60's only spending a couple hours a week with their kids really sad. Both dads and kids missed out on a lot of possible knowledge and skill sharing.

Anyway, interesting stuff.

Cultural barrier adds to women's lower pay

Studies by Linda C. Babcock, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, show that not only do women not negotiate for better pay and better positions as often as men, but that women are often frowned upon and penalized if they do: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20030873/?GT1=10150
So basically a Catch 22, unless women don't mind being hated. :/ My problem with the article at least, since I didn't read the studies, was they didn't offer an answer to this dilemma, they just sort of said, "Yup, women are screwed, good luck with that." Maybe they think that just by becoming aware of the issue people will not judge women as harshly for asking for what they want, but that just seems unrealistic to me. To me this falls into the same category as actively promoting Math and the Sciences to girls and being more tolerant of different cultures in schools.

Speaking of math, science, school, and girls, there was also an interesting article on MSN about Danica McKellar's (yes, from The Wonder Years) book that tries to teach middle-school aged girls that Math is cool and ways that it is applicable in their lives, apparently with lots of lip gloss: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20010729/site/newsweek/?GT1=10150. Now, while I appreciate the effort, I question whether writing it in the style of a teen magazine is really the answer. McKellar acknowledges she wrote it with a specific audience in mind, but, not to sound crass, is that audience going to voluntarily read a book like this, even if it's written in the style of Seventeen? I have no idea, and I don't think anyone else does either, so it'd be interesting to me to see how this book sells.