Learning Begins


Book Description

Learning Begins, written by a teacher for teachers, translates current brain research into practical classroom strategies. Because students learn with their brains, it simply makes sense for teachers to explore educational psychology and neuroscience. And yet, information in these fields can be daunting and contradictory. Worse still, few researchers can clearly explain the specific classroom uses of their remarkable discoveries. Learning Begins both explains this research and makes it useful for teachers and administrators. Part I investigates the science of working memory: a cognitive capacity essential to all school work. When teachers recognize the many classroom perils that can overwhelm working memory, they can use research-aligned strategies to protect it, and thereby promote student learning. Part II reveals the complexities of student attention. By understanding the three neural sub-processes that create attention, teachers can structure their classrooms and their lessons to help students focus on and understand new material. Written in a lively and approachable voice, based on years of classroom experience and a decade of scientific study, Learning Begins makes educational psychology and neuroscience clear and useful in schools and classrooms.




Andrew Watson


Book Description

Today, seeing Black footballers playing the game at the very highest level is considered very normal. This, certainly, was not the case one hundred and forty years ago, and this is what makes the story of Andrew Watson so remarkable. It seems hard to imagine that a Guyanese-born Black man could head the Scottish national football team in 1881 in a game against England. Not only was he captain, but he also led them to a 6-1 victory in London - an achievement that still ranks as England's heaviest ever defeat on home soil.




Revolutions that Made the Earth


Book Description

The Earth that sustains us today was born out of a few remarkable, near-catastrophic revolutions, started by biological innovations and marked by global environmental consequences. The revolutions have certain features in common, such as an increase in complexity, energy utilization, and information processing by life. This book describes these revolutions, showing the fundamental interdependence of the evolution of life and its non-living environment. We would not exist unless these upheavals had led eventually to 'successful' outcomes - meaning that after each one, at length, a new stable world emerged. The current planet-reshaping activities of our species may be the start of another great Earth system revolution, but there is no guarantee that this one will be successful. The book explains what a successful transition through it might look like, if we are wise enough to steer such a course. This book places humanity in context as part of the Earth system, using a new scientific synthesis to illustrate our debt to the deep past and our potential for the future.




DNA


Book Description

Fifty years ago, James D. Watson, then just twentyfour, helped launch the greatest ongoing scientific quest of our time. Now, with unique authority and sweeping vision, he gives us the first full account of the genetic revolution—from Mendel’s garden to the double helix to the sequencing of the human genome and beyond. Watson’s lively, panoramic narrative begins with the fanciful speculations of the ancients as to why “like begets like” before skipping ahead to 1866, when an Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel first deduced the basic laws of inheritance. But genetics as we recognize it today—with its capacity, both thrilling and sobering, to manipulate the very essence of living things—came into being only with the rise of molecular investigations culminating in the breakthrough discovery of the structure of DNA, for which Watson shared a Nobel prize in 1962. In the DNA molecule’s graceful curves was the key to a whole new science. Having shown that the secret of life is chemical, modern genetics has set mankind off on a journey unimaginable just a few decades ago. Watson provides the general reader with clear explanations of molecular processes and emerging technologies. He shows us how DNA continues to alter our understanding of human origins, and of our identities as groups and as individuals. And with the insight of one who has remained close to every advance in research since the double helix, he reveals how genetics has unleashed a wealth of possibilities to alter the human condition—from genetically modified foods to genetically modified babies—and transformed itself from a domain of pure research into one of big business as well. It is a sometimes topsy-turvy world full of great minds and great egos, driven by ambitions to improve the human condition as well as to improve investment portfolios, a world vividly captured in these pages. Facing a future of choices and social and ethical implications of which we dare not remain uninformed, we could have no better guide than James Watson, who leads us with the same bravura storytelling that made The Double Helix one of the most successful books on science ever published. Infused with a scientist’s awe at nature’s marvels and a humanist’s profound sympathies, DNA is destined to become the classic telling of the defining scientific saga of our age.




Learning Grows


Book Description

Combining a lively voice with scientific research, Learning Grows explores the fascinating and useful world of student motivation. Written for teachers—and everyone interested in teaching and learning—Learning Grows helps classrooms flourish by fostering students’ intrinsic motivation. Part I delves into Mindset. Although seemingly well known, this theory is often oversimplified and widely misunderstood. By exploring its step-by-step historical development, we can use it more flexibly and effectively to help learners ‘charge!’ when they might otherwise ‘retreat.’ Part II enters the paradoxical world of Stereotype Threat. A surprising cascade of counter-intuitive effects can cause students to struggle in school—not because they don’t care, but because they work too hard. The right classroom strategies block this demotivational pathway, and thereby foster student learning. By interleaving psychology and neuroscience research with dozens of practical classroom examples, Learning Grows makes these two theories both clear and immediately useful. Learning Grows is the second book in the series “A Teacher’s Guide to the Learning Brain.” The first book, Learning Begins, studies the science of working memory and attention.




Under Our Skin


Book Description

Can it ever get better? This is the question Benjamin Watson is asking. In a country aflame with the fallout from the racial divide—in which Ferguson, Charleston, and the Confederate flag dominate the national news, daily seeming to rip the wounds open ever wider—is there hope for honest and healing conversation? For finally coming to understand each other on issues that are ultimately about so much more than black and white? An NFL tight end for the New Orleans Saints and a widely read and followed commentator on social media, Watson has taken the Internet by storm with his remarkable insights about some of the most sensitive and charged topics of our day. Now, in Under Our Skin, Watson draws from his own life, his family legacy, and his role as a husband and father to sensitively and honestly examine both sides of the race debate and appeal to the power and possibility of faith as a step toward healing.




Silent Journey


Book Description

Scott Schroeder dreams of a day when he and his father can have a home of their own. Following an accident that took his mother's life eight years before, doctors discovered Scott was suddenly deaf. Blessed with being an accomplished gymnast and skilled at signing and reading lips, Scott's biggest challenge is convincing others he is able to do all the same things as those in the hearing world. Picking up on conversations he observes along the way, Scott figures out a big family secret concerning his father and uncle and makes his mind up to play a part in their reconciliation.




Debating Pornography


Book Description

Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, debates over pornography have raged, and the explosive spread in recent years of sexually explicit images across the Internet has only added more urgency to these disagreements. Politicians, judges, clergy, citizen activists, and academics have weighed in on the issues for decades, complicating notions about what precisely is at stake, and who stands to benefit or be harmed by pornography. This volume takes an unusual but radical approach by analyzing pornography philosophically. Philosophers Andrew Altman and Lori Watson recalibrate debates by viewing pornography from distinctly ethical platforms -- namely, does a person's right to produce and consume pornography supersede a person's right to protect herself from something often violent and deeply misogynistic? In a for-and-against format, Altman first argues that there is an individual right to create and view pornographic images, rooted in a basic right to sexual autonomy. Watson counteracts Altman's position by arguing that pornography inherently undermines women's equal status. Central to their disagreement is the question of whether pornography truly harms women enough to justify laws aimed at restricting the production and circulation of such material. Through this debate, the authors address key questions that have dogged both those who support and oppose pornography: What is pornography? What is the difference between the material widely perceived as objectionable and material that is merely erotic or suggestive? Do people have a right to sexual arousal? Does pornography, or some types of it, cause violence against women? How should rights be weighed against consequentialist considerations in deciding what laws and policies ought to be adopted? Bolstered by insights from philosophy and law, the two authors engage in a reasoned examination of questions that cannot be ignored by anyone who takes seriously the values of freedom and equality.




DNA


Book Description

The definitive insider's history of the genetic revolution--significantly updated to reflect the discoveries of the last decade. James D. Watson, the Nobel laureate whose pioneering work helped unlock the mystery of DNA's structure, charts the greatest scientific journey of our time, from the discovery of the double helix to today's controversies to what the future may hold. Updated to include new findings in gene editing, epigenetics, agricultural chemistry, as well as two entirely new chapters on personal genomics and cancer research. This is the most comprehensive and authoritative exploration of DNA's impact--practical, social, and ethical--on our society and our world.




Digital Images and Human Vision


Book Description

These fifteen contributions by distinguished vision and imaging scientists explore the role of human vision in the design of modem image communication systems. A dominant theme in the book is image compression—how compression algorithms can be designed to make best use of what we know about human vision. Electronic image communications, which encompass television, high-definition television, teleconferencing, multimedia, digital photography, desktop publishing, and digital movies, is a rapidly growing segment of technology and business. Because these products and technologies are designed for human viewing, knowledge of human perception is essential to optimal design. This book provides a timely compendium of important ideas and perspectives on such subjects as the key aspects of human visual sensitivity that are relevant to image communications and, conversely, the major problems in image communications that vision science can address; the mathematical models of human vision that are useful in the design of image comunications systems; reliable and efficient methods of evaluating visual quality; and aspects of human vision that can be exploited to provide substantial improvements in coding efficiency. Andrew B. Watson is Senior Scientist for Vision Research at NASA. Contributors: Albert J. Ahumada, Jr. E. Barth. V. Michael Bove, Jr. Gershon Buchsbaum. Phillipe Cassereau. Pamela C. Cosman. Scott J. Daly. Michael Eckert. Bernd Girod. William E. Glenn. Robert M. Gray. Paul J. Hearty. Bradley Horowitz. Stanley Klein. Jeffrey Lubin, Cynthia Null. Karen L. Oehler. Alex Pentland. Todd Reed. Andrew B. Watson. B. Wegmann. Christof Zetsche.