Why do little kids ask to hear the same story over and over?

One way people learn new words is through reading books and stories. Little kids love hearing their favorite stories over and over and are also very good at learning new words. We wondered if reading the same stories could be helping preschool kids learn new words. Our research tested if it was better to read the same stories over and over or to read a few different stories. Here we tell you about three studies that show preschool kids learn more words from the same stories over and over. Our research suggests that it’s easier to learn new words from stories when you have heard the story before and know what is going to happen

Origin Gaps and the Eternal Sunshine of the Second-Order Pendulum

The rich experiences of an intentional, goal-oriented life emerge, in an unpredictable fashion, from the basic laws of physics. Here I argue that this unpredictability is no mirage: there are true gaps between life and non-life, mind and mindlessness, and even between functional societies and groups of Hobbesian individuals. These gaps, I suggest, emerge from the mathematics of self-reference, and the logical barriers to prediction that self-referring systems present. Still, a mathematical truth does not imply a physical one: the universe need not have made self-reference possible. It did, and the question then is how. In the second half of this essay, I show how a basic move in physics, known as renormalization, transforms the "forgetful" second-order equations of fundamental physics into a rich, self-referential world that makes possible the major transitions we care so much about. While the universe runs in assembly code, the coarse-grained version runs in LISP, and it is from that the world of aim and intention grows.Comment: FQXI Prize Essay 2017. 18 pages, including afterword on Ostrogradsky's Theorem and an exchange with John Bova, Dresden Craig, and Paul Livingsto

Influence of Gender on Disaster Volunteers: an Exploratory Study of Mennonite Disaster Service

There is a substantial amount of literature concerning volunteerism, particularly the relationship between volunteerism and women. Researchers theorize that volunteerism, gender, and faith are positively correlated. Much remains to be discovered about the roles of women within faith-based volunteer organizations like Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS). This study examines the evolution of changing gender roles within MDS using archival data and an extensively deployed survey (n=852). Data from the 2010 MDS survey is used in OLS regression and binary logistics regression models to examine the association between volunteerism and gender. Overall, survey data and archival evidence support the notion that women's roles in MDS have evolved considerably over time, albeit unevenly. It appears that when controlling for socio-demographic variables, level of orthodoxy, and importance of faith, the effect of being female does significantly influence the number of times volunteered. Furthermore, being female does significantly influence holding a leadership position on a MDS project site. Historically, women were not able to volunteer as much as men because of domestic duties and today women still volunteer significantly fewer times than do men. Furthermore, while women historically have permeated some leadership roles such as committee members; today, they are still significantly less likely than are men to hold a leadership position on MDS project sites.Department of Sociolog

The effects of shared storybook reading on word learning: a meta-analysis

Although an abundant literature documents preliterate children’s word learning success from shared storybook reading, a full synthesis of the factors which moderate these word learning effects has been largely neglected. This meta-analysis included 38 studies with 2,455 children, reflecting 110 effect sizes, investigating how reading styles, story repetitions, tokens and related factors moderate children’s word comprehension, while adjusting for the number of target words. Dialogic reading styles, tokens, and the number of words tested all moderated word learning effects. Children’s age, who read the story, and time between story and test were not moderators. We identify story repetition and word types as topics which merit further research. These results provide information to guide researchers and educators alike to the factors with the greatest impact on improving word learning from shared storybook readin