【推荐2】Putting children in daycare helps working parents take their minds off childcare.     1    

How daycare negatively affects children is related to many factors. One study has suggested that some children who spend long hours in daycare centers experience more stress than those who spend more time in a setting with a mother.

Another study has shown that children who are shy have a higher level of the hormone cortisol (皮质醇) which is released when an individual shows signs of stress.     2     And as a result the child may not mix well with the other children and the teachers at the daycare center, a situation that can cause stress.

Another negative impact of daycare is that there is less communication between a mother and her child.     3     So it is essential for a child to develop a deep bond with his or her mother, since this will lay the foundation for all the relationships he or she will form later on in life. Children who spend a lot of time with their mothers experience healthy social and emotional development, while long hours in daycare can disrupt this bonding. Children who lose out on precious mother-child bonding are observed to have behavioral problems as they grow older.

Children in daycare centers also feel unprotected compared to children at home. In a daycare center, when one caregiver attends to more than one child at the same time, she may not be able to look deeply into why a child is mixing well or not.     4     Another negative aspect of daycare is that children there are more likely to fall ill if they come in contact with sick children.

    5     Well-maintained daycare centers contribute a great deal to the overall development of a child by providing a structured environment. Children become more social by interacting with other children of the same age, and learn new activities that are not always available if they are brought up only at home.

【推荐3】Adults are often unwilling to ask for aid. The moment you ask for directions, after all, you reveal that you are lost. Seeking assistance can feel like you are broadcasting your incompetence. New research suggests young children don’t seek help in school for the same reason. They hate hearing irresponsible comments.

The research has revealed that youngsters as young as age five start to care about the way others think about them. It also suggests that as early as age seven, children begin to connect asking for help with looking incompetent in front of others.

To learn more about how children think about reputation, researchers crafted simple stories and then asked children questions to allow them to show their thinking. They asked 576 children aged four to nine to predict the behavior of two kids in a story. One of the kids genuinely wanted to be smart, and the other merely wanted to seem smart to others. Both kids did poorly on a test. Children were asked which of these kids would be more likely to ask the teacher for help in front of their class.

The four-year-olds were equally likely to choose either of the two kids as the one who would seek help. But by age seven or eight, children thought that the kid who wanted to seem smart would be less likely to ask for assistance. When assistance could be sought privately, they thought both characters were equally likely to ask for it.

The research shows that children may avoid seeking help when others are present. However, when they are concerned with their appearance to others, learning will suffer.

Such barriers likely require reputation-based solutions. Teachers could make themselves available to students for one-on-one conversations while their classmates tackle group work. They should also help students perceive asking questions as normal, positive behavior. Parents could point out how a child’s question kicked off a valuable conversation in which the entire family got to talk and learn together. Such response sends a strong signal that other people value a willingness to ask for aid and that seeking help is part of a path to success.

【推荐1】A secretive facial recognition program “could announce the end of public anonymity (匿名),” said Kashmir Hill in The New York Times. While police departments have used facial recognition tools for years, they’ve been limited to searching government-provided images, for example driver’s license photos. Now an app called Clearview AI can remove images of faces “from across the internet”—including social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, employment sites, even Venmo—gathering a database of more than 3 billion photos. “Until now, technology that readily identifies everyone based on his or her face has been forbidden because of its invasion of privacy.” Clearview licenses its technology to more than 600 law implementation agencies. New York City passed on the app after a 90-day test, worried about potential misuse. Clearview’s investors “predict that its app will eventually be available to the public.” Soon, “searching someone by face could become as easy as Googling a name.”

We’ve been building toward this moment for a long time, said Adrian Chen in The California Sunday Magazine. In the late 1800s, the French police officer Alphonse Bertillon devised the first “method for identifying criminals based on their physical features,” using 11 physical measurements. But scale changes everything. The Department of Homeland Security plans to scan “97 percent of all passengers on outgoing international flights.” And the technology has been improved and commercialized to the point where you can search a database and buy scans for as little as “40 cents an image if you opt for Amazon’s facial recognition software plan.”

All this has already led to growing fears about facial recognition, said Janosch Delcker and Cristiano Lima in Politico.com, but “efforts to check its spread are hitting a wall of resistance on both sides of the Atlantic.” A two-party push to limit the government’s use of facial recognition has been delayed in Congress. The European Union (EU) is discussing a five-year temporary ban, but European privacy rules contain “a broad carve-out for public authorities.” And authorities are using it: London’s police just last week enabled live facial recognition for cameras across the city.

Even if some bans on the technology succeed, said Bruce Schneier in The New York Times, we’re still building an “observation society.” Facial recognition is just one identification technology among many. An entirely unregulated data industry is already creating “descriptions of who we are and what our interests are” by tracking our movements, purchases, and interactions. “We are being identified without our knowledge, and society needs rules about when that is permissible.”

【推荐2】Handwriting, which has developed over ages, is receiving a tech edge from the boom in artificial intelligence(AI). Thanks to the rapid advances in technology, new smart hardware is reshaping how pupils will write and interact with teachers.

Equipped with a built-in mini camera, T-One, an AI-enabled smart pen can click up to 240 images(图像) per second, and store content handwritten on 400 A4-sized pages. Meanwhile, it can immediately digitalize students, handwritten notes, automatically evaluating their answers and potentially reducing the workload of teachers.

When students write with the smart pen on a piece of specially produced paper, which is printed with an invisible dot code pattern, the high-speed camera at the front of the pen can record the movement of the penpoint. And the pressure sensor will store all the information such as writing time and speed, and page number. Information thus collected is sent via Bluetooth to computers or other hand-held devices(设备), which are equipped with Master Learner’s “super teacher” system. The system can automatically review students’ homework on behalf of teachers.

The system is said to be able to evaluate answers. Professor James, founder of Master Learner, said, “Handwriting has always played an irreplaceable role as a medium of interaction between teachers and students. Unlike typing on the keyboard, writing on paper is still the most preferred way in Chinese classrooms and examinations.”

According to him, the smart pen is meant to digitalize the education process, and improve efficiency(效率) while protecting the traditional writing habits. “We are starting to mass-produce the smart pen. In the future, their appearance, weight and feel will be similar to that of conventional pens,” James said hopefully, without mentioning its price.

【推荐3】Piaget’s   theory   of   cognitive(认知的) development   is   a   theory   about   the   nature   and development of human intelligence. It was first created by the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980). The theory deals with the nature of knowledge itself and how humans gradually   come   to   acquire,   construct,   and   use   it . Piaget’s   theory   is   mainly   known   as   a developmental stage theory.

To   Piaget,   cognitive   development   was   a   progressive   reorganization   of   mental   processes resulting from biological maturation and environmental experience. He believed that children construct an understanding of the world around them, experience differences between what they already   know   and   what   they   discover   in   their   environment,   and   then   adjust   their   ideas accordingly. Besides, Piaget claimed that cognitive development is at the center of the human organism, and language is depending on knowledge and understanding acquired through cognitive development.

Piaget’s earlier work received the greatest attention. Child-centered classrooms and "open education" are direct applications of Piaget’s views. Despite its huge success, Piaget’s theory is not perfect and Piaget has recognized it himself: for example, the theory supports sharp stages rather than continuous development.

Piaget noted that reality is a dynamic system of continuous change. Reality is defined (给……下定义) in reference to the two conditions that define dynamic systems. Specifically, he argued that reality involves transformations and states. Transformations refer to all manner of changes that a thing or person can experience. States refer to the conditions or the appearances in which things or persons can be found between transformations. For example, there might be changes in shape or form , in size, or in placement or location in space and time. Thus, Piaget argued, if human intelligence is to be adaptive, it must have functions to represent both the transformational and the static aspects of reality.