Tag Archives: childhood

Idea Soup, Technica

Girlfriend or Nuclear Reactor?

YellowcakeAsk a typical 14 year-old boy if he’d prefer to have a girlfriend or a home-made nuclear fission reactor he’s highly likely to gravitate towards the former. Not so Taylor Wilson; he seems to prefer the company of Geiger counters, particle accelerators, vacuum tubes and radioactive materials.

From the Guardian:

Taylor Wilson has a Geiger counter watch on his wrist, a sleek, sporty-looking thing that sounds an alert in response to radiation. As we enter his parents’ garage and approach his precious jumble of electrical equipment, it emits an ominous beep. Wilson is in full flow, explaining the old-fashioned control panel in the corner, and ignores it. “This is one of the original atom smashers,” he says with pride. “It would accelerate particles up to, um, 2.5m volts – so kind of up there, for early nuclear physics work.” He pats the knobs.

It was in this garage that, at the age of 14, Wilson built a working nuclear fusion reactor, bringing the temperature of its plasma core to 580mC – 40 times as hot as the core of the sun. This skinny kid from Arkansas, the son of a Coca-Cola bottler and a yoga instructor, experimented for years, painstakingly acquiring materials, instruments and expertise until he was able to join the elite club of scientists who have created a miniature sun on Earth.

Not long after, Wilson won $50,000 at a science fair, for a device that can detect nuclear materials in cargo containers – a counter-terrorism innovation he later showed to a wowed Barack Obama at a White House-sponsored science fair.

Wilson’s two TED talks (Yup, I Built A Nuclear Fusion Reactor and My Radical Plan For Small Nuclear Fission Reactors) have been viewed almost 4m times. A Hollywood biopic is planned, based on an imminent biography. Meanwhile, corporations have wooed him and the government has offered to buy some of his inventions. Former US under-secretary for energy, Kristina Johnson, told his biographer, Tom Clynes: “I would say someone like him comes along maybe once in a generation. He’s not just smart – he’s cool and articulate. I think he may be the most amazing kid I’ve ever met.”

Seven years on from fusing the atom, the gangly teen with a mop of blond hair is now a gangly 21-year-old with a mop of blond hair, who shuttles between his garage-cum-lab in the family’s home in Reno, Nevada, and other more conventional labs. In addition to figuring out how to intercept dirty bombs, he looks at ways of improving cancer treatment and lowering energy prices – while plotting a hi-tech business empire around the patents.

As we tour his parents’ garage, Wilson shows me what appears to be a collection of nuggets. His watch sounds another alert, but he continues lovingly to detail his inventory. “The first thing I got for my fusion project was a mass spectrometer from an ex-astronaut in Houston, Texas,” he explains. This was a treasure he obtained simply by writing a letter asking for it. He ambles over to a large steel safe, with a yellow and black nuclear hazard sticker on the front. He spins the handle, opens the door and extracts a vial with pale powder in it.

“That’s some yellowcake I made – the famous stuff that Saddam Hussein was supposedly buying from Niger. This is basically the starting point for nuclear, whether it’s a weapons programme or civilian energy production.” He gives the vial a shake. A vision of dodgy dossiers, atomic intrigue and mushroom clouds swims before me, a reverie broken by fresh beeping. “That’ll be the allanite. It’s a rare earth mineral,” Wilson explains. He picks up a dark, knobbly little rock streaked with silver. “It has thorium, a potential nuclear fuel.”

I think now may be a good moment to exit the garage, but the tour is not over. “One of the things people are surprised by is how ubiquitous radiation and radioactivity is,” Wilson says, giving me a reassuring look. “I’m very cautious. I’m actually a bit of a hypochondriac. It’s all about relative risk.”

He paces over to a plump steel tube, elevated to chest level – an object that resembles an industrial vacuum cleaner, and gleams in the gloom. This is the jewel in Wilson’s crown, the reactor he built at 14, and he gives it a tender caress. “This is safer than many things,” he says, gesturing to his Aladdin’s cave of atomic accessories. “For instance, horse riding. People fear radioactivity because it is very mysterious. You want to have respect for it, but not be paralysed by fear.”

…

The Wilson family home is a handsome, hacienda-style house tucked into foothills outside Reno. Unusually for the high desert at this time of year, grey clouds with bellies of rain rumble overhead. Wilson, by contrast, is all sunny smiles. He is still the slightly ethereal figure you see in the TED talks (I have to stop myself from offering him a sandwich), but the handshake is firm, the eye contact good and the energy enviable – even though Wilson has just flown back from a weekend visiting friends in Los Angeles. “I had an hour’s sleep last night. Three hours the night before that,” he says, with a hint of pride.

He does not drink or smoke, is a natty dresser (in suede jacket, skinny tie, jeans and Converse-style trainers) and he is a talker. From the moment we meet until we part hours later, he talks and talks, great billows of words about the origin of his gift and the responsibility it brings; about trying to be normal when he knows he’s special; about Fukushima, nuclear power and climate change; about fame and ego, and seeing his entire life chronicled in a book for all the world to see when he’s barely an adult and still wrestling with how to ask a girl out on a date.

The future feels urgent and mysterious. “My life has been this series of events that I didn’t see coming. It’s both exciting and daunting to know you’re going to be constantly trying to one-up yourself,” he says. “People can have their opinions about what I should do next, but my biggest pressure is internal. I hate resting on laurels. If I burn out, I burn out – but I don’t see that happening. I’ve more ideas than I have time to execute.”

Wilson credits his parents with huge influence, but wavers on the nature versus nurture debate: was he born brilliant or educated into it? “I don’t have an answer. I go back and forth.” The pace of technological change makes predicting his future a fool’s errand, he says. “It’s amazing – amazing – what I can do today that I couldn’t have done if I was born 10 years earlier.” And his ambitions are sky-high: he mentions, among many other plans, bringing electricity and state-of-the-art healthcare to the developing world.

Read the entire fascinating story here.

Image: Yellowcake, a type of uranium concentrate powder, an intermediate step in the processing of uranium ores. Courtesy of United States Department of Energy. Public Domain.

Arts and Letters, Idea Soup

Yes M’Lady

google-Thunderbirds

Beneath the shell that envelops us as adults lies the child. We all have one inside — that vulnerable being who dreams, plays and improvises. Sadly, our contemporary society does a wonderful job of selectively numbing these traits, usually as soon as we enter school; our work finishes the process by quashing all remnants of our once colorful and unbounded imaginations. OK, I’m exaggerating a little to make my point. But I’m certain this strikes a chord.

Keeping this in mind, it’s awesomely brilliant to see Thunderbirds making a comeback. You may recall the original Thunderbirds TV shows in the mid-sixties. Created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, the marionette puppets and their International Rescue science-fiction machines would save us weekly from the forces of evil, destruction and chaos. The child who lurks within me utterly loved this show — everything would come to a halt to make way for this event on saturday mornings. Now I have a chance of reliving it with my kids, and maintaining some degree of childhood wonder in the process. Thunderbirds are go…

From the Guardian:

5, 4, 3, 2, 1 … Thunderbirds are go – but not quite how older viewers will remember. International Rescue has been given a makeover for the modern age, with the Tracy brothers, Brains, Lady Penelope and Parker smarter, fitter and with better gadgets than they ever had when the “supermarionation” show began on ITV half a century ago.

But fans fearful that its return, complete with Hollywood star Rosamund Pike voicing Lady Penelope, will trample all over their childhood memories can rest easy.

Unlike the 2004 live action film which Thunderbirds creator, the late Gerry Anderson, described as the “biggest load of crap I have ever seen in my life”, the new take on the children’s favourite, called Thunderbirds Are Go, remains remarkably true to the spirit of the 50-year-old original.

Gone are the puppet strings – audience research found that younger viewers wanted something more dynamic – but along with computer generated effects are models and miniature sets (“actually rather huge” said executive producer Estelle Hughes) that faithfully recall the original Thunderbirds.

Speaking after the first screening of the new ITV series on Tuesday, executive producer Giles Ridge said: “We felt we should pay tribute to all those elements that made it special but at the same time update it so it’s suitable and compelling for a modern audience.

“The basic DNA of the show – five young brothers on a secret hideaway island with the most fantastic craft you could imagine, helping people around the world who are in trouble, that’s not a bad place to start.”

The theme music is intact, albeit given a 21st century makeover, as is the Tracy Island setting – complete with the avenue of palm trees that makes way for Thunderbird 2 and the swimming pool that slides into the mountain for the launch of Thunderbird 1.

Lady Penelope – as voiced by Pike – still has a cut-glass accent and is entirely unflappable. When she is not saving the world she is visiting Buckingham Palace or attending receptions at 10 Downing Street. There is also a nod – blink and you miss it – to another Anderson puppet series, Stingray.

Graham, who voiced Parker in the original series, returns in the same role. “I think they were checking me out to see if I was still in one piece,” said Graham, now 89, of the meeting when he was first approached to appear in the new series.

“I was absolutely thrilled to repeat the voice and character of Parker. Although I am older my voice hasn’t changed too much over the years.”

He said the voice of Parker had come from a wine waiter who used to work in the royal household, whom Anderson had taken him to see in a pub in Cookham, Berkshire.

“He came over and said, ‘Would you like to see the wine list, sir?’ And Parker was born. Thank you, old mate.”

Brains, as voiced by Fonejacker star Kayvan Novak, now has an Indian accent.

Sylvia Anderson, Anderson’s widow, who co-created the show, will make a guest appearance as Lady Penelope’s “crazy aunt”.

Read the entire story here.

Image courtesy of Google Search.

 

Idea Soup

Hyper-Parenting and Couch Potato Kids

Google-search-kids-playing

Parents who are overly engaged in micro-managing the academic, athletic and social lives of their kids may be responsible for ensuring their offspring lead less active lives. A new research study finds children of so-called hyper-parents are significantly less active than peers with less involved parents. Hyper-parenting seems to come in 4 flavors: helicopter parents who hover over their child’s every move; tiger moms who constantly push for superior academic attainment; little emperor parents who constantly bestow their kids material things; and concerted cultivation parents who over-schedule their kids with never-ending after-school activities. If you recognize yourself in one of these parenting styles, take a deep breath, think back on when as a 7-12 year-old you had the most fun, and let you kids play outside — preferably in the rain and mud!

From the WSJ / Preventive Medicine:

Hyper-parenting may increase the risk of physical inactivity in children, a study in the April issue of Preventive Medicine suggests.

Children with parents who tended to be overly involved in their academic, athletic and social lives—a child-rearing style known as hyper-parenting—spent less time outdoors, played fewer after-school sports and were less likely to bike or walk to school, friends’ homes, parks and playgrounds than children with less-involved parents.

Hyperparenting, although it’s intended to benefit children by giving them extra time and attention, could have adverse consequences for their health, the researchers said.

The study, at Queen’s University in Ontario, surveyed 724 parents of children, ages 7 to 12 years old, born in the U.S. and Canada from 2002 to 2007. (The survey was based on parents’ interaction with the oldest child.)

Questionnaires assessed four hyper-parenting styles: helicopter or overprotective parents; little-emperor parents who shower children with material goods; so-called tiger moms who push for exceptional achievement; and parents who schedule excessive extracurricular activities, termed concerted cultivation. Hyperparenting was ranked in five categories from low to high based on average scores in the four styles.

Children’s preferred play location was their yard at home, and 64% of the children played there at least three times a week. Only 12% played on streets and cul-de-sacs away from home. Just over a quarter walked or cycled to school or friends’ homes, and slightly fewer to parks and playgrounds. Organized sports participation was 26%.

Of parents, about 40% had high hyper-parenting scores and 6% had low scores. The most active children had parents with low to below-average scores in all four hyper-parenting styles, while the least active had parents with average-to-high hyper-parenting scores. The difference between children in the low and high hyper-parenting groups was equivalent to about 20 physical-activity sessions a week, the researchers said.

Read the entire story here.

Image courtesy of Google Search.

Arts and Letters, Idea Soup

Fourteen Years in Four Minutes

[tube]UH1x5aRtjSQ[/tube]

Dutch filmmaker Frans Hofmeester has made a beautiful and enduring timelapse portrait. Shot over a period of 14 years, the video shows his daughter growing up before our eyes. To create this momentous documentary work Hofmeester filmed his daughter, Lotte, for 15 seconds every week since birth. This is a remarkable feat  for both filmmaker and his subject, and probably makes many of us wish we could have done the same. Hofmeester created a similar timelapse video of Lotte’s younger brother Vince.

Read more on this story here.

Video courtesy of Frans Hofmeester.

Idea Soup

Merry Christmas and Happy Regression

Setting aside religious significance, the holidays season tends to be a time when most adults focus on children and family, in that order. But interestingly enough adults, consciously or not, regress to their younger selves during this extended time with parents and family.

From the Guardian:

In a characteristically serene post at Zen Habits, Leo Babauta points out that holiday family gatherings can be “the ultimate mindfulness training ground”: if you can remain centred and calm in the middle of Christmas dinner, you can presumably do so anywhere.

True, I’m sure. But for any of us heading back to childhood homes in the next few days – or, for that matter, reuniting elsewhere with the people we spent our childhoods with – there’s one huge challenge to be overcome. I’m talking, of course, about the ferocious black hole that sucks adult children, and their parents, back into family roles from years or even decades ago, the moment they’ve reassembled under one roof.

Holiday regression is an experience so universal that even therapists who specialise in this sort of stuff tend to counsel Just Dealing With It. “Expect to regress,” writes one. “Regression can be sweet,” ventures another. Forget all the progress you thought you’d made towards becoming a well-functioning and responsible member of society. For a week or so, you might as well be 13 again.

Actually, the concept of regression, like so many handed down from Freud, is probably best thought of as a poetic metaphor; modern psychology provides no real reason to believe that you’re literally returning to an earlier stage of ego development when you start passive-aggressively point-scoring with your sister over the mulled wine. The crucial point about those old family roles is that they work: they’re time-tested ways that your family discovered, over years, that enabled it to hold together as a family. The roughly 20 years between birth and fleeing the nest, as the therapist Marie Hartwell-Walker points out, is “a whole lot of practice for making the family style and our role in it permanent.”

None of that means it’s always – or even usually – enjoyable to play those roles. But they serve a purpose: the family unit’s purpose, if not necessarily your own.

Much as psychotherapists are drawn to family dynamics when it comes to explaining this sort of thing, however, more mundane psychological factors are surely also at play. We’ve learned lots in recent years about the emotional-eliciting qualities of different environments, and their role in the formation of memories. (There’s even been some interesting work on what, exactly, people are hoping to re-experience when they seek out a lost childhood home.) If you’re sleeping in the bedroom you slept in as a child, how could you avoid taking on some of the characteristics of the child who formerly slept there?

Meanwhile, there’s the particular aroma of the family home. Smell, as Marcel Proust knew and recent research confirms, can be a peculiarly powerful trigger for memories. In short: a trip back home will always be a psychological minefield.

Is there anything to be done? One of the more interesting suggestions borrows from the field of “embodied cognition”, which refers to the way our mental lives are lived through, and are influenced by, our bodies. (For example, clenching a fist has been found to enhance willpower; folding your arms aids perseverance.)

Read the entire article here.

Idea Soup

Us and Them: Group Affinity Begins Early

Research shows how children as young as four years empathize with some but not others. It’s all about the group: which peer group you belong to versus the rest. Thus, the uphill struggle to instill tolerance in the next generation needs to begin very early in life.

From the WSJ:

Here’s a question. There are two groups, Zazes and Flurps. A Zaz hits somebody. Who do you think it was, another Zaz or a Flurp?

It’s depressing, but you have to admit that it’s more likely that the Zaz hit the Flurp. That’s an understandable reaction for an experienced, world-weary reader of The Wall Street Journal. But here’s something even more depressing—4-year-olds give the same answer.

In my last column, I talked about some disturbing new research showing that preschoolers are already unconsciously biased against other racial groups. Where does this bias come from?

Marjorie Rhodes at New York University argues that children are “intuitive sociologists” trying to make sense of the social world. We already know that very young children make up theories about everyday physics, psychology and biology. Dr. Rhodes thinks that they have theories about social groups, too.

In 2012 she asked young children about the Zazes and Flurps. Even 4-year-olds predicted that people would be more likely to harm someone from another group than from their own group. So children aren’t just biased against other racial groups: They also assume that everybody else will be biased against other groups. And this extends beyond race, gender and religion to the arbitrary realm of Zazes and Flurps.

In fact, a new study in Psychological Science by Dr. Rhodes and Lisa Chalik suggests that this intuitive social theory may even influence how children develop moral distinctions.

Back in the 1980s, Judith Smetana and colleagues discovered that very young kids could discriminate between genuinely moral principles and mere social conventions. First, the researchers asked about everyday rules—a rule that you can’t be mean to other children, for instance, or that you have to hang up your clothes. The children said that, of course, breaking the rules was wrong. But then the researchers asked another question: What would you think if teachers and parents changed the rules to say that being mean and dropping clothes were OK?

Children as young as 2 said that, in that case, it would be OK to drop your clothes, but not to be mean. No matter what the authorities decreed, hurting others, even just hurting their feelings, was always wrong. It’s a strikingly robust result—true for children from Brazil to Korea. Poignantly, even abused children thought that hurting other people was intrinsically wrong.

This might leave you feeling more cheerful about human nature. But in the new study, Dr. Rhodes asked similar moral questions about the Zazes and Flurps. The 4-year-olds said it would always be wrong for Zazes to hurt the feelings of others in their group. But if teachers decided that Zazes could hurt Flurps’ feelings, then it would be OK to do so. Intrinsic moral obligations only extended to members of their own group.

The 4-year-olds demonstrate the deep roots of an ethical tension that has divided philosophers for centuries. We feel that our moral principles should be universal, but we simultaneously feel that there is something special about our obligations to our own group, whether it’s a family, clan or country.

Read the entire article after the jump.

Image: Us and Them, Pink Floyd. Courtesy of Pink Floyd / flickr.

BigBang

Helplessness and Intelligence Go Hand in Hand

From the Wall Street Journal:

Why are children so, well, so helpless? Why did I spend a recent Sunday morning putting blueberry pancake bits on my 1-year-old grandson’s fork and then picking them up again off the floor? And why are toddlers most helpless when they’re trying to be helpful? Augie’s vigorous efforts to sweep up the pancake detritus with a much-too-large broom (“I clean!”) were adorable but not exactly effective.

This isn’t just a caregiver’s cri de coeur—it’s also an important scientific question. Human babies and young children are an evolutionary paradox. Why must big animals invest so much time and energy just keeping the little ones alive? This is especially true of our human young, helpless and needy for far longer than the young of other primates.

One idea is that our distinctive long childhood helps to develop our equally distinctive intelligence. We have both a much longer childhood and a much larger brain than other primates. Restless humans have to learn about more different physical environments than stay-at-home chimps, and with our propensity for culture, we constantly create new social environments. Childhood gives us a protected time to master new physical and social tools, from a whisk broom to a winning comment, before we have to use them to survive.

The usual museum diorama of our evolutionary origins features brave hunters pursuing a rearing mammoth. But a Pleistocene version of the scene in my kitchen, with ground cassava roots instead of pancakes, might be more accurate, if less exciting.

Of course, many scientists are justifiably skeptical about such “just-so stories” in evolutionary psychology. The idea that our useless babies are really useful learners is appealing, but what kind of evidence could support (or refute) it? There’s still controversy, but two recent studies at least show how we might go about proving the idea empirically.

One of the problems with much evolutionary psychology is that it just concentrates on humans, or sometimes on humans and chimps. To really make an evolutionary argument, you need to study a much wider variety of animals. Is it just a coincidence that we humans have both needy children and big brains? Or will we find the same evolutionary pattern in animals who are very different from us? In 2010, Vera Weisbecker of Cambridge University and a colleague found a correlation between brain size and dependence across 52 different species of marsupials, from familiar ones like kangaroos and opossums to more exotic ones like quokkas.

Quokkas are about the same size as Virginia opossums, but baby quokkas nurse for three times as long, their parents invest more in each baby, and their brains are twice as big.

Read the entire article after the jump.

Idea Soup

Childhood Memory

[div class=attrib]From Slate:[end-div]

Last August, I moved across the country with a child who was a few months shy of his third birthday. I assumed he’d forget his old life—his old friends, his old routine—within a couple of months. Instead, over a half-year later, he remembers it in unnerving detail: the Laundromat below our apartment, the friends he ran around naked with, my wife’s co-workers. I just got done with a stint pretending to be his long-abandoned friend Iris—at his direction.

We assume children don’t remember much, because we don’t remember much about being children. As far as I can tell, I didn’t exist before the age of 5 or so—which is how old I am in my earliest memory, wandering around the Madison, Wis. farmers market in search of cream puffs. But developmental research now tells us that Isaiah’s memory isn’t extraordinary. It’s ordinary. Children remember.

Up until the 1980s, almost no one would have believed that Isaiah still remembers Iris. It was thought that babies and young toddlers lived in a perpetual present: All that existed was the world in front of them at that moment. When Jean Piaget conducted his famous experiments on object permanence—in which once an object was covered up, the baby seemed to forget about it—Piaget concluded that the baby had been unable to store the memory of the object: out of sight, out of mind.

The paradigm of the perpetual present has now itself been forgotten. Even infants are aware of the past, as many remarkable experiments have shown. Babies can’t speak but they can imitate, and if shown a series of actions with props, even 6-month-old infants will repeat a three-step sequence a day later. Nine-month-old infants will repeat it a month later.

The conventional wisdom for older children has been overturned, too. Once, children Isaiah’s age were believed to have memories of the past but nearly no way to organize those memories. According to Patricia Bauer, a professor of psychology at Emory who studies early memory, the general consensus was that a 3-year-old child’s memory was a jumble of disorganized information, like your email inbox without any sorting function: “You can’t sort them by name, you can’t sort them by date, it’s just all your email messages.”

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Summer school memories. Retouched New York World-Telegram photograph by Walter Albertin. Courtesy of Wikimedia.[end-div]