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Pretty soon, you're going to be 13. It's an important year in your life, and as i'm sure you're aware, it's the year you can have an account on sites like Twitter, Gmail and Facebook. It's a point where we think that you're old enough and wise enough to do two things: act like an adult, and take a bit of advice from your geeky uncle.
TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read)
Listen first
Know your friends.
Nothing is private.
Stay on guard.
Don't feed the trolls.
Create more than you consume.
Right, so what the heck do i mean by all that?
"To understand the school one has to begin with a completely different mindset from that which dominates current educational thinking. One has to begin with the thought: Adults do not control children's education; children educate themselves."
"That's why I force myself to talk to little girls as follows.
"Maya," I said, crouching down at her level, looking into her eyes, "very nice to meet you."
"Nice to meet you too," she said, in that trained, polite, talking-to-adults good girl voice.
"Hey, what are you reading?" I asked, a twinkle in my eyes. I love books. I'm nuts for them. I let that show.
Her eyes got bigger, and the practiced, polite facial expression gave way to genuine excitement over this topic. She paused, though, a little shy of me, a stranger.
"I LOVE books," I said. "Do you?""
What motivates young adults to start using the popular microblogging site Twitter? Can we identify any systematic patterns of adoption or is use of the service randomly distributed among internet users of this demographic? Drawing on unique longitudinal data surveying 505 diverse young American adults about their internet uses at two points in time (2009, 2010), this article looks at what explains the uptake of Twitter during the year when the site saw considerable increase in use. We find that African Americans are more likely to use the service as are those with higher internet skills. Results also suggest that interest in celebrity and entertainment news is a significant predictor of Twitter use mediating the effect of race among a diverse group of young adults. In contrast, interest in local and national news, international news, and politics shows no relationship to Twitter adoption in this population segment.
"While some psychologists — and many parents — have worried that a child who suffered a bad fall would develop a fear of heights, studies have shown the opposite pattern: A child who’s hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely as a teenager to have a fear of heights.
By gradually exposing themselves to more and more dangers on the playground, children are using the same habituation techniques developed by therapists to help adults conquer phobias, according to Dr. Sandseter and a fellow psychologist, Leif Kennair, of the Norwegian University for Science and Technology. "
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It is perhaps best to think of schoolchildren as holding a liminal position with respect to science and the rest of society. They are not quite inside the scientific community or squarely outside it either. They are both science and "the public", and they are neither of these things, yet. Their lives could go in a range of directions.
Arguably, their occupying this midway position is why the Google Science Fair projects were so inventive. So what can we do to further this sort of liminality in grownup science? How can we extend the social spheres of our professional scientists, especially those who define the research agenda, so they might draw inspiration more effectively from the diversity of publics that fund them?
"She said everyone can draw until we are told or convince ourselves that we cannot. We start out drawing everything we see until that day comes when it is pointed out that our drawing of a dog, for example, looks nothing like a dog. Then we begin to believe we cannot draw.
Some few people actually can draw very well, if by that you mean "realistically and accurately." They can draw a dog that looks exactly like a dog. I respect and envy them. It is worth saying however that from a philosophical viewpoint their dog looks no more like a dog than mine does, because their drawing is a two-dimensional representation of the real animal, rendered in either various color choices or some version of monotones. Nor does a photograph look like a dog. You see my point."
"Children of college graduates score about one standard deviation above the mean by the time they're three, and that never changes. Children of mothers with less than a high school education score about half a standard deviation below the mean by the time they're three, and that never changes either. Roughly speaking, nothing we do after age three has much effect"
Profile - essay on Barbara Follett, a 1920s child writing prodigy.
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