Archive for December, 2009

The Pew Hispanic Center recently released a report describing Internet usage amongst Latinos in the US. Overall, the report was very encouraging. From 2006 to 2008, the percentage of adult Latinos who used the Internet grew by 10 percentage points from 54 to 64 percent. The percentage of adult whites who used the internet...

This advice is intended for anyone interested in pursuing graduate education (toward the Ph.D.) on a full-time basis, not for part-timers or weekend scholars. Also, my graduate education was in the sciences, so some of what I say may not apply to someone in, say, management or the humanities. 1. Maintain a positive attitude...

One of the big ideas in the world of education (both K-12 and postsecondary) is the whole notion of “learning styles.” By this, we mean that people have different ways of learning and recalling knowledge and information. For example, some people consider themselves “visual” learners, which means they need to see pictures and words...

In the latest issue of Psychological Science, Chen, Cohen, and Miller report that kids from low socioeconomic status (SES) families show elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol. From their abstract: Individuals with a low socioeconomic status (SES) are at increased risk for mental and physical health problems, and the relationship may be mediated...

There’s been a lot of news lately in the world of artificial intelligence. First up, was the news from IBM Research. Last month they reported that they had constructed a cortical simulator built upon the IBM Blue Gene supercomputing architecture. According to IBM, this cortical simulation is able to run at near-real-time, and possesses...