Make Spatial Relationships

When estimating the number of casualties planes flying into the World Trade Center's towers would cause, Osama bin Laden believed burning jet fuel only would weaken the steel above the plane crashes. According to Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower, bin Laden thought higher floors would collapse, but lower ones would remain standing.

    Spatial relationships are important for architects and engineers who design buildings and cars and for dentists who need to know how upper and lower teeth should fit together, but being able to make accurate calculations about spatial relationships is a skill needed by people everywhere in the world. Check how the skill is used in the following examples:

• Knowing where to sit at a sporting event or play so the view isn't obstructed by a pole,
• Figuring how many cars can be parked in a lot,
• Assembling furniture by looking at instructions,
• Visualizing how atoms are arranged in a molecule,
• Deciding how many pans are needed to bake five dozen cookies for a bake sale.

Recent studies suggest ways to help children develop spatial visualization skills. Engineering professor Sheryl A. Sorby recommends playing with blocks, using two-dimension instructions to build with LEGOs, holding objects and sketching them when turned in different positions. She also suggests introducing girls to the toys sold by Goldie Blox (goldieblox.com). Other teachers have had students draw maps, design 3-D treehouses, build robots, knit, play chess, and use 3-D modeling software SketchUp. Theater classes are a natural place to learn blocking, i.e. positioning and spacing actors so that everyone in the audience can see what is happening on stage. Art classes model with clay and learn techniques to create the illusion of space on a two-dimension surface. 

     The connection that seems to exist among spatial reasoning, math skills, creativity, and the arts is reason enough to get kids up and doing things all around the world.

   

Can You Be Modern and Belong to an Organized Religion?

Whenever world renowned scientists proclaim they are atheists, I wonder if they know how to create some thing out of nothing and how they can discount the religious beliefs that have come down through the ages.

Professors at the Harvard Divinity School's Religious Literacy Project and Wellesley College must have been thinking about the bigotry and prejudice that discounting another's religious beliefs fuels, when they created the free online class on religious literacy that starts March 1. They recognize that religions are not stagnant. They are evolving and religious texts have various historical and contemporary interpretations.

Since religion plays an important and complex role in the lives of young and old around the world, from time to time, I have written posts on the topic: "Why Do They Hate Us?" "Respect the Faith," and "This We Believe." The Harvard/Wellesley series should be much more informative. You can learn more at eds.org/xseries/world-religions-through-scriptures#why-xseries.

The Next War?

Throw out traditional texts on military strategy, if you count cyberwarfare which already has begun and the war envisioned by the February, 2016 Munich Security Conference.

   The Munich Conference expects future wars will engage killer robots with GPS guidance systems, facial-recognition technology, and artificial intelligence that wouldn't get tired, scared, or hungry and wouldn't retreat. Some suggest these robots would be less dangerous and more precise than land mines or nuclear bombs.

      But others warn that the same hackers who can alter data in electrical grids, hospitals, and financial markets could disrupt what military robots will do. Also, hackers could disrupt the so-called Internet of Things (IoT): cars, elevators, thermostats, refrigerators and other appliances that are directed by smart chips. For example, they could turn the IoT into spies on enemies.

Front-Runners for UN Secretary-General

Considerations for choosing a new UN Secretary-General before Ban Ki-Moon's term ends this year:

• Eastern Europe has never been represented in this position
• A woman has never been the UN's Secretary-General
• All permanent UN members (US, UK, France, Russia, and China) have to agree on the nominee
• He/she has to have the support of his/her country

Front-runners:

• Irina Bokova from Bulgaria
• Vuk Jeremic from Serbia
• Danilo Turk from Slovenia
• Vesna Pusic from Croatia

Others who have shown interest:

• Helen Clark from New Zealand
• Natalia Gherman from Moldova
• Antonio Guterres from Portugal: Chosen by Security Council members Oct. 6, 2016 
• Srgjan Kerim from Macedonia
• Igo Luksic from Montenegro

Let's Talk Fashion

Rules provide fashion guidance according to the new book, Ametora (the Japanese slang abbreviation for American style tradition). With that in mind, I put together the following guidance for boys and girls with an aptitude and interest in fashion.

     Fashion is one of the easiest industries to enter.
The winner of the new "Fashion Runway Jr." TV program in the US is 14 years old. Even younger kids sell their beaded jewelry at craft fairs. Whip up a bow tie on a sewing machine or print a graphic T-shirt and take it to the investors on "Shark Tank," to the etsy.com website, or to your own yard sale.

     Customers look for both the new and the old, when it comes to fashion.
Wearable watches, health wristbands, and other electronics all have created demand for the devices that Sangtae Kim at MIT is designing to convert energy from walking and running into power for new wearables. At the same time other consumers are creating a demand for the designers making clothes and accessories made from recycled materials and for the designers modifying styles from the past: Ivy league/preppy, hippie, military, Hawaiian, hip hop/rapper, heavy-duty-rugged-outdoor-lifestyle, health-conscious-surfer-skateboarding-outdoor-lifestyle, gangster/rebel/delinquent, vintage, and, of course, the standard uniform for men (dark suit, white dress shirt, black plain toe shoes).

     Customers look for both luxury and mass market brands.
Globalization has made it possible to carve out a niche for expensive, limited-edition goods among the superwealthy in countries throughout the world. It helps to keep an eye on markets in the shifting countries that have the strongest currencies. Or, you can create the new hoodie or infinity scarf to sell everywhere: in department and discount stores, on TV, over the internet, in direct mail catalogs, or in open air markets.

     Customers demand authentic fashion and imitations.
While some customers want items only from the country that originated them, like jeans from the USA, others are satisfied wearing mandarin collars, Nehru jackets, Indonesian shirts, or hijab head scarves that are made anywhere.

     Girls and boys with an interest in fashion are not limited to being designers.
They can become fashion illustrators and photographers or write the background stories some customers want along with their purchases. New styles can originate in the cartoons kids draw, what they wear in their garage bands, the costumes they design for school plays, and in how they express themselves in streetwear, that is, what they put together to wear when they walk down the street.

     Fashion is a field that thrives on what's new.
Even the color that's in today can be out tomorrow. Anywhere in the world, a youngster could be thinking up the next new fashion trend.





   

Bacteria Talk to Each Other

Although the mosquito-borne Zika disease is a virus, its spread draws attention to how quickly illnesses from viruses or bacteria can be carried throughout the world. As many have observed, walls cannot keep diseases from entering any country.

     Earlier posts, "Infection-Killing Bugs and Antibiotics" and "Global Search for New Antibiotics," have looked at various ideas for overcoming the growing resistance infections are showing to cures from existing antibiotics. Research by Helen E. Blackwell, a chemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin, adds to these findings.

     Blackwell has learned bacteria send chemical signals to each other. These signals can cause bacteria, which are simple, tiny organisms with short life spans, to sense a quorum, meaning to form a group big enough to infect an animal or help a plant.

     Once Blackwell discovered the communication properties of bacteria, she began tinkering with their signals in order to block their ability to cause infections. She also notes it could be possible to cause bacteria to start conversations that would do good things for their hosts.

     I was interested to read in The Guardian (November 20, 2015) that, not only can one person catch an infection from another, but Chinese scientists have discovered a gene in a ring of DNA that passes resistance to the antibiotic, colistin, along with bacterial infections. In other words, in this case, humans infected with bacteria from other humans also are infected with resistance to one particular antibiotic cure.