Dyslexia and Dyscalculia in the Alpha-numeric Age

Dyslexia and Dyscalculia in the Alpha-numeric Age

* * *

So we want to find a "gene" involved or some sort of more detailed neuro-network structure?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110526141414.htm

There are a lot of links along these lines:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100615141751.htm

* * *

Today I find this the lead article on Science Daily when I have had thoughts that may seem to amount to ranting- but these are serious issues for the young.

To start with, Aristotle held these three professions most high- that of the teacher, the healer, and the farmer. I seems to me that since the 70's all three of these things have gone down hill and most are not aware of it in their generation from a view over wider time.

I probably should not leave the radio on PBS over night- but all left on the night light tele is infomercials (of which apparently for such adverts we now pay). Also I should probably not listen to the talk radio with its more right wing view when I can probe thru the weather on my AM radio. This influence and cognitive dissonance seems to make it hard to vote and for a long time seemed my fault to the point I perhaps should not vote if I know not what I am doing.

Well, I still need to get rid of last winter's fat, I mean since I last ate well food has changed- too many things in it, artificial and so on that even though I walk so much it is hard to not gain weight. Adding three flights of stairs last year did not help at all. The more we study the food the more it seems that it has become a less healthy for us to eat- perhaps better to just go for the fatty sugar food groups while a third of us eat out anyway- no one cooks, grandmas biscuits became Bisquick, and her children cannot make biscuits at all. All the tenet tobacco farm and grandma- walking thru the southern black community, the neighbors waving hi and the children crossing the street to say hi to you rather than cross to avoid you- it reminds me of home and the home cooking coming from their drafty houses. Of course there are the insecticides to worry about, and the cost and proportions reduced.

But it turn out on PBS the book Over Diagnosed came out and it confirms some of my observations on my fellow man from a left wing conspiracy view. As our technology gets better we find more an more diseases- the "Better safe than sorry- an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Ben Franklin's sayings perverted. It seems it is easier to make money, usually thru government programs like medicare, by enticing more patients by their fears not to have preventive explorations. Ben Franklin's sayings perverted. It seems it is easier to make money, usually thru government programs like medicare, by enticing more patients by their fears not to have preventive explorations. So we monitor high blood pressure and recruit patients to lower it to the point where they have harm, and have to stay on such medications the rest of their lives. It is now even questioned to what extent we should lower certain levels of cholesterol without some genetic history of heart aliments- that it would be better not to know the value. Sadly, many who have ailments that are for real do not get the help they need.

Added to this is the notion that we find certain cancers the better we can see them. In a sense we all have our imperfections- we are cancer survivors as usually we die from other things first. The prostate and breast cancers are prime examples of what is over operated upon and over diagnosed. Cervical cancer or pre-cancer is another better safe than sorry procedure if left alone will 90% of the time go into remission but not so if you use the scraping or laser scraping of which the women in my neighborhood all had to find out if they needed the procedure when the hospitals got the technology. The woman doctors published in JAMA these statistics a decade and a half ago- but what does a woman doctor know in the good old boys meat market for unnecessary hysterectomies? What ever happened to the 50's motto that the fear of cancer was worse for society than the cancer itself? Why do the poor fall for more "cancer insurance" and are targeted for it? It is said here, in Wisconsin, by the left and so called "middle class" in the private and public sectors that the current Governor in his cutbacks will cause a lot of deaths because of less payed for prevention procedures. In my cognitive dissonance the case could be the opposite. Anyway I have had medicaid now for a year and have never needed to use it but apparently the state pays someone for it regardless of how little I have needed medicine. The old guys around me, especially if they got involved with the Veteran's hospitals, all seem to be falling apart this year, a long winter.

Medicine has skyrocketed in the costs, and so have the drugs. But we also should worry about the institutions of education. The tele news shows reported yesterday that the burden of student loan debts has reached a trillion dollars and surpassed the national credit card debt. My friend, and actor in the coffee shop, says that he owes 50K dollars and it is hard to continue his degree path and hard to find a job in his field. I remark as I count pennies for today's coffee- that wow, I am at zero today and yet I am 50K richer than you and many others.

One of the investors in facebook was on the news and has a program to encourage kids to start a business and drop out of school- if he had waited for the internet project for those involved to graduate it would have passed the ripe time to start such a business. Anyway we all know the longer one is in Harvard Business School the less likely one can make money, or those who drop out make more of it. The investor has given some of these young entrepreneurs 100K to drop out- even though he somewhat of a prodigy and has degrees- well, these seem my thoughts too as we go beyond the post economic and alphanumeric age. Again, since the 70's and 80's the cost of education has gone up way too much as to be out of reach anyway for most students who may have to delay their careers perhaps forever. The CEO and the chancellors have a lot in common it seems. These so called capitalist in the public and private sector are living of the capital now of our future as a nation after a long period of decline where they made the wealth of the interest they lived off meaningless.

But the good news is that money is rendered meaningless- that is there is nothing stopping those who care about wisdom and health and so on from founding new institutions, virtual ones perhaps- which does make the world better in general and for our children. Our need for credentials and job security and recognition (I suppose just to know we are not invisible and exist and can actually contribute to the society that asks us to do so for free, to volunteer while they have slogans that help no group as they speak with hypocrisy, the same for certain so called Christian groups who are not really Christian but in name only, the money changers.) can be designed in these new times, ourselves and bootstraps to rebuild the world after its man-made tsunamis. This applies to mental health too as we strive to clone again extinct species from former dark ages and wonder if all things considered we should do so. At least we desire an option to extend life but hold its quality up if we do so- not to merely save starving children in distant continents that seems good beyond the appeal of our hearts and that the numbers who survive the inoculations are more? But where do we put so many more people if we do not design our world a little more logically?

Welcome to our invisible university then, the forerunners of not only a new physics but a new world- only this time, wisdom and its lovers have a level and new playing field.

* * *

Footnote (Physics): I have discussed some things on the holographic principle and found this later (I usually google my brain first and forget to check out what exists in the literature):

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/research/gr/public/holo/

"Assertion 1 The first assertion of the Holographic Principle is that all of the information contained in some region of space can be represented as a `Hologram' - a theory which `lives' on the boundary of that region. For example, if the region of space in question is the DAMTP Tearoom, then the holographic principle asserts that all of the physics which takes place in the DAMTP Tearoom can be represented by a theory which is defined on the walls of the Tearoom.

Assertion 2 The second assertion of the Holographic Principle is that the theory on the boundary of the region of space in question should contain at most one degree of freedom per Planck area."

Some say the boundary is fuzzy (Lubos for example)between the walls and the room. Some say the information is lost. Some debate on what unit or series of them to base the Planck area (Pitkanen for example). But it seems to me (myself for example) that the second assertion here is the unit origin or singularity or null consideration in the quasic plane from some more general view of space and number. As the article went on to say- we do not yet know how to incorporate asymptotic freedom in the QCD. The problem is philosophically a little deeper than that- we do not know how to incorporate freedom in the first place, at least intelligibly and comprehensively.

* * *