Dyslexic pupils not helped by reading method

Up to 400,000 dyslexic children may be hampered in learning to read by the Government’s insistence on the use of synthetic phonics to teach them, says a report to be published today.

A poll of more than 500 literacy teachers reveals that more than half (52 per cent) believe that the Government’s approach is either “ineffective” or “not very effective” in helping dyslexic pupils.

They believe that children with other disabilities and the most able pupils could also be held back. The poll, carried out by ReadingWise UK – designers of online literacy materials – casts doubt on the Government’s favoured strategy for improving reading.

“Literacy support needs to be tailored to the learning pace, experience and needs of the individual child – delivered by teachers with the appropriate specialist training to identify those who might struggle,” said Dr Tilly Mortimore, senior lecturer at Bath Spa University’s School of Education.

“Neither children who are fluent readers, nor those at risk of Special Learning Difficulties/dyslexia or other reading disabilities are likely to find a ‘one size fits all’ intensive synthetic phonics programme helpful. Furthermore, the Government’s punitive testing regime risks undermining both teachers and learners.”

Black Death skeletons dug up during London Crossrail excavations

Skeletons unearthed during excavations for London’s Crossrail project are those of Black Death victims who were buried during the 14th and 15th Century pandemics, DNA analysis has revealed.
The skeletons of 13 men, three women and two children, along with seven other unidentifiable remains, were found under Charterhouse Square in Farringdon during excavation work for the £14.8 billion project.

It is thought that the area near the Barbican Centre, which was just outside the city boundary at the time, may be the location the location of the second emergency burial ground referenced in historical documents but until now it had never found.

Set up in the capital to cater for the masses of bodies, it means that thousands more could have been buried in a mass grave in the area. A 'community excavation project' is set to take place in July to try to determine the extent of the cemetery.

Carbon dating techniques on 10 of the skeletons conducted by scientists from Queen's University Belfast indicated three separate “phases” of burials - coinciding with known separate outbreaks of the plague in the capital.

Reading rehabilitates prisoners: it is not a privilege to be earned

Chris Grayling’s latest reform to the justice system has gone viral as news emerged he had banned prisoners from receiving books sent from outside. A blog piece penned by Frances Cook, of the Howard League, outlined some of the items that prisoners were now to be prohibited from receiving, including underwear (meaning shared pants, worn for months on end) and home-made gifts (making a personalised birthday card from a child into illicit contraband).

The item that most captured popular attention was the banning of the books. This has produced a very strong reaction from writers and novelists. Mark Haddon, award winning author of The Strange Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, has described it as malign and pointless extra punishment. And other authors such as Philip Pullman, as well as academics including Mary Beard have given their support to a growing campaign urging the Ministry of Justice to review the decision. There is now also an official petition.

It is important to stress that Grayling has not banned books. The measure means that the right to books will become part of the “incentives and earned privileges scheme”. Extra books are allowed if bought with money earned from good behaviour – but this only occurs when the prisons deem inmates worthy and, even then, they can only be purchased from a specific (government-approved) catalogue.

Why testing four-year-olds as they start school is a bad idea

The coalition government is to introduce the testing of young children soon after they enter primary school at the age of four or five.

English children are already tested far more than children in most other countries and if our four and five year olds are tested, they will be amongst the very youngest children in the world to undergo a formal assessment of their abilities and achievements.

Some people think this testing is long overdue; many others think that it is not only a waste of time but it is very damaging to young children’s confidence at a time when they are having to adjust to new surroundings and new ways of learning. Is the testing then a welcome development or a harmful activity?

The government believes that testing is necessary to find out where children are at the beginning of their formal education so that their progress can then be mapped out and eventually assessed at age 11 and later at age 16.

The tests are supposed to measure not only the children’s progress, but also how good the schools are that they attend. Children will be given a baseline test when they start reception, and are expected to have achieved a new standard by the end of primary school. It all sounds very sensible and straightforward. But is it?

Famous paintings help study the Earth’s past atmosphere

A team of Greek and German researchers has shown that the colours of sunsets painted by famous artists can be used to estimate pollution levels in the Earth’s past atmosphere.


In particular, the paintings reveal that ash and gas released during major volcanic eruptions scatter the different colours of sunlight, making sunsets appear more red.

When the Tambora volcano in Indonesia erupted in 1815, painters in Europe could see the colours of the sky changing. The volcanic ash and gas spewed into the atmosphere travelled the world and, as these aerosol particles scattered sunlight, they produced bright red and orange sunsets in Europe for up to three years after the eruption. J. M. W. Turner was one of the artists who painted the stunning sunsets during that time. Now, scientists are using his, and other great masters’, paintings to retrieve information on the composition of the past atmosphere.


“Nature speaks to the hearts and souls of great artists,” says lead-author Christos Zerefos, a professor of atmospheric physics at the Academy of Athens in Greece. “But we have found that, when colouring sunsets, it is the way their brains perceive greens and reds that contains important environmental information.”

What makes Chinese maths lessons so good?

Chinese students begin learning their maths facts at a very early age: maths textbooks begin with multiplication in the first semester of second grade, when children are seven years old. In order to understand multiplication, pupils have to memorise the multiplication rhyme: “four times eight is 32, five times eight is 40” and so on, which was invented by ancient Chinese scholars 2,200 years ago.

Stemming from this tradition, most classrooms have few concrete teaching materials for maths lessons. The cultural traditions of Chinese maths education lead people to believe that routine practice is the most efficient way to learn.

This continues today. And as a result, schools in Shanghai have scored highly in recent years on international tests of maths ability. It is this aptitude for maths among Chinese schoolchildren that has led the UK government to announce plans to bring over 60 maths teachers from Shanghai to help teach in centres of excellence.

How to teach ... Earth Hour

Millions of people will switch off their lights on Saturday for Earth Hour, a campaign to raise awareness of climate change and environmental issues.

Whether it's researching the famous landmarks that take part, discussing ways of saving energy or investigating endangered species, we have plenty of teaching resources to ensure that pupils won't be left in the dark.

Get started with this Earth Hour assembly presentation. It encourages pupils to think about some of the environmental challenges the world is facing and steps they can take to help. Pupils can then test their knowledge of endangered species in this PowerPoint quiz.

WWF, the organisers of Earth Hour, have also created a support pack for schools. It contains a range of ideas to get pupils thinking about their own environmental concerns. In one activity, pupils write a wish for the planet's future on a star that can be cut out, decorated and used to make a display of the night sky featuring animal-shaped constellations.

In another activity, pupils learn about endangered species using a selection of fact sheets. Working in groups, pupils must find an engaging way of sharing information about their animal with the rest of the class. Ideas include playing a "Who am I?" guessing game or making a PowerPoint presentation. As a homework activity, pupils can use these templates to create fact sheets about either the snow leopard, African elephant or bottlenose dolphin. Additional templates for the mountain gorilla, polar bear and hawksbill turtle are available on the Earth Hour website.

The Flynn effect: your kids are smarter than you

We've all heard of the IQ test, or Intelligence Quotient test. It supposedly measures how smart you are. What you might not have realised is that the scores or results that people achieve are adjusted, or 'fiddled'. This is to both get the average IQ to be 100 points, and to make sure that about two-thirds of people will lie in the IQ band between 85 and 115 points.

But you might not have heard that, averaged around the world, the typical IQ is not fixed – it seems to be creeping upwards, at about three points every decade.

This story begins back in 1948, when the psychologist R D Tuddenham examined the IQ scores of American men who had been conscripted into the military, between 1917 and 1943. He showed that their IQ was increasing by about 4.4 points every decade. This strange increase in IQ over the decades was rediscovered by Richard Lynn in 1982, and James Flynn in 1984 – and today it's known as the 'Flynn effect'.

IQ tests are limited – they do not measure musical or artistic creativity, or the so-called emotional quotient. So let's look at a typical IQ test, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (or WISC). It measures 10 separate cognitive skills. These include information (for example, on what continent is Mexico?), arithmetic, vocabulary, comprehension (why are houses in a street given numbers?), and similarities (how are dogs and rabbits related?).

Masters of Disguise—Amazing Insect Camouflage

To avoid becoming prey, insects use mimicry to blend into their surroundings.

When it comes to biology, mimicry is everywhere. Lions use camouflage to blend in with the savanna. Frogs use mimicry to match their green environment. Most famously, chameleons will even change color to blend in with their backgrounds. (See "Find the Mimic" in National Geographic magazine.)

For their part, researchers have long been fascinated with mimicry, and for some contemporaries of Darwin like naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, it was mimicry and camouflage that helped convince them of the power of natural selection. Nature selects for successful traits: Insects that can blend in with their environments are less likely to be eaten and are able to pass on their genes-and their natural disguises-to future generations. (Related: "Photo Gallery: Masters of Undersea Camouflage.")

But according to a study released yesterday, it turns out that a certain type of leaf mimicry dates back much further than experts believed, to the time of the dinosaurs. (See "Stick Insects Have Mimicked Plants Since the Age of Dinosaurs.")

Brain scans are fascinating but behaviour tells us more about the mind

This is good, talking to people is better. Peter Byrne/PA

Imagine you’ve suddenly been given a job as a car mechanic but there’s a slight hitch: you know nothing whatsoever about cars, there are no books to help you, no internet and no-one who is willing to tell you anything. You’ve got some cars that work perfectly and a handful that seem not to work so well or are behaving differently. What do you do?

You will probably come to the conclusion that the easiest way to find out how cars work is to look at the engines of the ones that won’t start, are making an unusual noise, or won’t drive in a straight line, and see how they are different from the cars that are working normally. This same principle can be applied to understanding how the mind works.

In 1861, a doctor named Paul Broca was working with a patient “Tan”, a name bestowed upon him because it was one of the only things he could say. Tan had gradually lost his speech over a 21-year period, yet he was still able to understand what was said to him and had no obvious loss of intellectual function. Broca was an astute man and when this patient died he made a request to look at Tan’s brain. As he suspected, he found that a specific area of the brain had been damaged, a part of the frontal lobe, so he concluded that this area must be vital for speaking but not so for understanding speech.

Bonding with your child matters for their life chances

The idea that parenting matters for early child development is now widely accepted. We also now know a great deal about the role of parenting in social inequalities in development. Parents with more resources can invest more in activities and goods for their children from the start. For example, parents with more education expose their children to a much wider vocabulary.

A parent, however, is not only the child’s first teacher, but also their first caregiver. Mothers and fathers influence their children’s development, not only through the resources they invest in their children and the linguistic and cognitive stimulation they offer, but also through the attachment or bond they forge with their children.

The central idea of attachment is that good social and emotional development depends on sensitive and responsive caregiving in infancy and early childhood. A secure attachment to a parent gives a child a secure base from which to explore, learn, relate to others, and flourish. But not all children develop a secure attachment. 

Types of attachment

When a parent, most of the time, responds to a child in a sensitive and responsive way – picking up the child when they cry, and holding and reassuring them – the child feels secure that a parent will meet his or her needs. The infant, when distressed, knows what to do and how the parent will respond: the infant can safely express negative emotion and seek proximity to the caregiver – and can expect to feel better. This is what is called a secure attachment. About 60% of children in the general population are securely attached.

Should we do away with ‘dyslexia’?

Many children have difficulty reading, but should we label this dyslexia? shutterstock

In their recently published book, The Dyslexia Debate, Joe Elliott and Elena Grigorenko controversially call for the term “dyslexia” to be abandoned. They argue it is an imprecise label that does nothing to assist the children to whom it is applied.

So what is wrong with the term “dyslexia”?

No-one is denying the reality of children’s reading difficulties, or that these need to be identified and treated as early as possible. What is in question is whether we should give the label of “dyslexia” to children with reading difficulties.

It is important to note that reading ability falls on a continuum in the population; it is normally distributed like height or weight. Thus, deciding whether a child does or does not have dyslexia will always involve applying an arbitrary cut-off.

In this sense, a diagnosis of dyslexia is similar to a diagnosis of obesity. It is quite different from a diagnosis of, say, measles where it is clear when someone has it and when they do not.

Follow the herd: how school farms can teach valuable life skills

Whether it's used to raise animals or grow vegetables, a little bit of green space can be a valuable teaching resource.

 
One size doesn't fit all

While your ambitions may be grand, the size of your farm will be limited by the space available on your school grounds. That might mean dashing your dreams of rustling cattle at sundown, but the good news is that any primary or secondary has room for some form of agricultural project.

The Elms School in Malvern boasts a herd of 18 cattle, pigs and a vegetable garden. But, as headteacher Alastair Thomas explains, it's not the size of your farm that matters, it's what you do with it that counts.

"Whether you live on a small estate or a flat in London, you can grow anything," he says. "Even if you're only planting baby carrots on your balcony, it's about giving kids a different life skill at a time when we are so obsessed with exams and results. You are giving them a chance to reflect on other things."

Sue Verdeyen, education officer at Three Counties Agricultural Society, advises schools with limited space to create a makeshift greenhouse on a spare window ledge. Simply get a bit of cardboard and tin foil, pop the little feed pots on the edge of it so the light is reflected and make sure you turn them round from time to time. Start small and expand it gradually.

Pearson to expand low-cost schooling in poor countries

TOKYO -- U.K. education and media company Pearson is expanding its private-school business aimed at developing countries, planning to open 30-50 junior high schools in the Philippines by 2015.

The schools typically charge several dollars in monthly tuition in countries where many families cannot afford the cost of other types of schools. The hope is that Pearson's expertise in running schools will improve the quality of education in developing countries in Asia and Africa, aiding the fight against poverty.

Pearson specializes in the development of educational materials. It is also a major media company and owns U.K. business news publisher Financial Times Group.

Medieval age revealed at Cannington Court

 

Restoration work at Cannington Court (UK), have revealed the remains of the former 13th century Priory complex.
EDF Energy, in partnership with Bridgwater College, is currently restoring Cannington Court as a state-of-the-art training campus for employees in the UK. Remains of the former 13th century Priory complex were revealed during construction work for a new garden area as part of the sensitive restoration project.
It was the first opportunity for archaeologists to investigate this part of the site and whilst the presence of such remains was suspected, the recent investigations offered the first solid evidence of their survival. Remains of ancillary buildings associated with the secular use of the site were identified and recorded alongside excavation of the walls, rooms and associated features.

The property was originally founded by Robert de Courcy in 1138 and has enjoyed an interesting history including service as a Priory, Benedictine nunnery, family home and a school.

Homer’s great literary masterpieces dated by study of Greek language evolution

Homer’s great masterpieces, The Iliad and The Odyssey, have been dated to around 762 BCE by new research based on the statistical modelling of language evolution.

Scientists from the University of Reading used evolutionary-linguistic statistical methods to compare the language in Homer’s Iliad with Modern Greek and Hittite (an extinct language in Anatolian branch of Indo European languages, 1200-1600 BCE) and have confirmed what many historians and classicists have long believed; that these literary classics date from the 8th century BCE.

Professor Mark Pagel’s research team analysed the differences in a common set of vocabulary items between Homeric Greek, Modern Greek and ancient Hittite and assessed the probable times in years separating these languages, given the percentage of words they shared combined with the knowledge of the rates at which different words change. The research dated the Homerian epics with a 95% certainty within a date range of 376 BCE and 1157 BCE, with a mean estimate of 762 BCE.

What a flexed BICEP tells us about the big bang

The cosmological community is bubbling with the news that the BICEP2 experiment may have detected gravitational waves through measuring the radiation left over from the big bang.

If the findings are correct, we will have the most convincing evidence to date that very early on, the universe experienced a phase of extremely rapid expansion known as “inflation”, during which a very small region was stretched to an enormous size, becoming bigger than our observable universe.

We’ll also have a direct window into understanding particle physics at incredibly high energies and, in particular, the period of “grand unification”. This is far beyond what is possible to probe in particle experiments like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

The big bang model says our universe is expanding and, as it does, it is slowly cooling down. Turning back the clock, this means that when the universe was much younger, it was also much hotter. The cosmic microwave background, which BICEP2 was probing, is radiation left over from this hotter epoch and provides the best evidence we have that the big bang actually happened.

Stress undermines empathic abilities in men but increases them in women

Stressed males tend to become more self-centered and less able to distinguish their own emotions and intentions from those of other people. For women the exact opposite is true. Stress, this problem that haunts us every day, could be undermining not only our health but also our relationships with other people, especially for men. Stressed women, however, become more “prosocial,” according to new research.

These are the main findings of a study carried out with the collaboration of Giorgia Silani, from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste. The study was coordinated by the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Unit of the University of Vienna and saw the participation of the University of Freiburg. This is the main finding of a study just published in Psychoneuroendocrinology, carried out with the collaboration of SISSA in Trieste.

"There's a subtle boundary between the ability to identify with others and take on their perspective -- and therefore be empathic -- and the inability to distinguish between self and other, thus acting egocentrically" explains Silani. "To be truly empathic and behave prosocially it's important to maintain the ability to distinguish between self and other, and stress appears to play an important role in this."

The Beginning of Everything - The Big Bang

How did all begin? Find out here, watching this interesting video made by Kurzgesat. Kurzgesagt is a team of designers from Munich who loves science. The team makes fun, short videos trying to explain "serious" stuff such as evolution, climate change and the solar system.

Autism and intellectual disability incidents linked with environmental factors

An analysis of 100 million U.S. medical records reveals that autism and intellectual disability (ID) rates are correlated at the county level with incidence of genital malformations in newborn males, an indicator of possible congenital exposure to harmful environmental factors such as pesticides.

Autism rates—after adjustment for gender, ethnic, socioeconomic and geopolitical factors—jump by 283 percent for every one-percent increase in frequency of malformations in a county. Intellectual disability rates increase 94 percent. Slight increases in autism and ID rates are also seen in wealthier and more urban counties.

The study, published by University of Chicago scientists in the March 13 issue of PLOS Computational Biology, confirms the dramatic effect of diagnostic standards. Incidence rates for autism and ID on a per-person basis decrease by roughly 99 percent in states with stronger regulations on diagnosis of these disorders.

“Autism appears to be strongly correlated with rate of congenital malformations of the genitals in males across the country,” said study author Andrey Rzhetsky, professor of genetic medicine and human genetics. “This gives an indicator of environmental load and the effect is surprisingly strong.”

Obesity Researchers Have Been Looking At The Wrong Gene

If you were investigating a crime scene, you wouldn’t just accuse the nearest bystander. The real culprit could be miles away.

In 2007, a team of British researchers announced that genetic variants within the FTO gene could predispose people to being fat. On average, people with one set of these variants weighed 1.6 kilograms more than people with none, and those with two sets—including one in six Europeans—weighed 3 kilograms more.

It was an important discovery. By studying twins, scientists had already shown that obesity runs in families, to an extent that can’t be explained by a shared environment. It was clear that some genes can influence how much we weigh (though, obviously, not exclusively*), but no one had identified any of them. FTO was the first. The media, as is their unfortunate wont, labelled it a “fat gene”.

Many later studies corroborated FTO’s connection to body weight. When scientists deleted the gene in mice, the rodents grew up thinner. When they switched the gene on, over and above its usual activity, mice ate more and put on weight. The pieces seemed to fit.

But right from the start, FTO was shrouded in mystery. No one really knew what the gene did, nor how it could influence our weight. And some parts of the FTO story just didn’t make sense.

Assessing the acoustics of Stonehenge

Why did the builders of Stonehenge choose to transport giant bluestones hundreds of kilometres from Wales to Salisbury Plain?

Dr George Nash from Bristol’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology is involved in research which is taking a novel approach to solving the mystery.

The ‘Landscape and Perception Project’, led by Paul Devereux and Jon Wozencroft from the Royal College of Art, has been assessing the archaeoacoustic value of the bluestones, with Dr Nash and prehistorian Professor Timothy Darvill of Bournemouth University acting as advisors on the project.

The builders of Stonehenge transported thirty or more giant bluestones 260 km from the prehistoric stone quarry of Carn Menyn Ridge in Mynydd Preseli, South-west Wales to Salisbury Plain.

The Royal College of Art team tested over a thousand rocks at points all along the Carn Menyn Ridge and found that on average, between five and ten per cent of the rocks ‘ring’ when hit with a hammer-stone. In some localised areas, the figure rises significantly to between 15 and 20 per cent.

How the ancient Greeks shaped modern mathematics – video animation

In this Royal Institution animation about a group of revolutionary thinkers who changed the way we see mathematics, we see that maths isn't just about performing calculations, but a way of understanding and testing the reality of the world around us. Ancient thinking is still helping engineers, scientists, economists, architects gain a better understanding of our world

This project was supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Animation by 12foot6. Narrated by James Grime.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2014/mar/12/ancient-greeks-modern-mathematics-video?CMP=twt_gu 

College Students Outsmarted By Preschoolers At Figuring Out Gizmos

Preschoolers can be smarter than college students at figuring out how unusual toys and gadgets work because they’re more flexible and less biased than adults in their ideas about cause and effect, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Edinburgh.

The findings suggest that technology and innovation can benefit from the exploratory learning and probabilistic reasoning skills that come naturally to young children, many of whom are learning to use smartphones even before they can tie their shoelaces. The findings also build upon the researchers’ efforts to use children’s cognitive smarts to teach machines to learn in more human ways.

“As far as we know, this is the first study examining whether children can learn abstract cause and effect relationships, and comparing them to adults,” said UC Berkeley developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, senior author of the paper published online in the journal, Cognition.

Superior Visual Thinking May Be Key to Independence for High Schoolers With Autism

Researchers at UNC’s Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG) and UNC’s School of Education report that teaching independence to adolescents with autism can provide a crucial boost to their chances for success after high school.

“We explored many factors that contribute to the poor outcomes people with autism often experience,” said Kara Hume, co-principal investigator of FPG’s Center on Secondary Education for Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (CSESA). “It’s clear that teaching independence to students with autism should be a central focus of their activities in high school.”

According to Hume, independence is the biggest indicator of which students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are likely to live on their own, have a job, and participate in their communities after high school. “However, adolescents with ASD have trouble observing their peers and picking up on skills important for developing independence,” she said.

Hume also said students with ASD experience difficulties with communication that inhibit their ability to ask questions and express preferences, and many have trouble dealing with new situations. This resistance to change can create problems when teachers and caregivers try to reduce their roles.

Gesturing with hands is a powerful tool for children’s math learning

Children who use their hands to gesture during a math lesson gain a deep understanding of the problems they are taught, according to new research from University of Chicago’s Department of Psychology.

Previous research has found that gestures can help children learn. This study in particular was designed to answer whether abstract gesture can support generalization beyond a particular problem and whether abstract gesture is a more effective teaching tool than concrete action.

“We found that acting gave children a relatively shallow understanding of a novel math concept, whereas gesturing led to deeper and more flexible learning,” explained the study’s lead author, Miriam A. Novack, a PhD student in psychology.

The study, “From action to abstraction: Using the hands to learn math,” is published online by Psychological Science.

Elephants can recognise the gender and ethnicity of human voices

Wild elephants can recognise the gender and ethnicity of a person just by listening to the sound of their voice, a new study has found.

A study conducted by researchers at the University of Sussex found the animals demonstrated more fear when they heard the voices of adult Masai men, compared to Kamba men.

Karen McComb, a professor of animal behaviour and cognition at the University of Sussex, and her colleagues at the University went to Amboseli National Park in Kenya, where hundreds of wild elephants live among humans.

"Basically they have developed this very rich knowledge of the humans that they share their habitat with," Prof McComb explained.

Speed reading apps are great for snippets but not sonnets

A new app is about to come on the market with promises to dramatically increase the speed at which you read. Spritz is a text streaming technology that allows you to read a sentence, one word at a time. Each word is shown for only a brief flash, in the same place on a screen, before the next appears.

Up to 1,000 words can be shown every minute, which would allow you to race through an entire novel in just 90 minutes. This could revolutionise the way we read, particularly on small-screen devices, such as smartphones and smartwatches.

How it works

When we read, our eyes normally make a series of brief pauses to extract information before moving on. These are referred to as eye movement fixations and saccades. It is only during fixations that the eye processes what is before it.

Survey shows deep class divide in reading habits

Researchers identify significant link between deprivation and not reading books.

 

Research shows 'significant' link between a family’s reading habits and a child’s future attitude to reading … a mother reads a bedtime story. Photograph: Alamy

 

New research shows a stark and "worrying" cultural divide in the UK when it comes to reading, with half the country picking up a book at least once a week for pleasure, and 45% preferring television.

The England-wide survey of the reading habits of 1,500 adults conducted by DJS Research for Booktrust [PDF] says that on average, the higher the socio-economic group that someone is in, the more often they read: 27% of DEs never read books themselves, compared with 13% of ABs, while 62% of ABs read daily or weekly, compared with 42% of DEs. Reading charity Booktrust, which commissioned the research, believes its findings should serve as a warning that "Britain's divided reading culture is a barrier to social mobility".

The study indicates "links between deprivation and not reading books", said Booktrust, with those who never read living in more deprived areas, with a higher proportion of children living in poverty, and those who read less "more likely to be male, under 30, and have lower levels of qualifications, happiness, and satisfaction within their lives".

More than blood and bling: our many visions of the Vikings

 

The Vikings have arrived at the British Museum. This exhibition, the first of its kind for decades, is notable for its scale and ambition. That there is sufficient demand is unsurprising, given the recent flurry of publications, exhibitions, documentaries, and even TV dramas. But does this popularity simply emerge from the romance of mythology and adventure, or is something more interesting at play?

The Vikings have an enduring appeal in the popular and academic consciousness. The narrative that surrounds them is invariably tied to a very tired debate as to whether the Vikings were raiders or merchants. But this raider-trader dichotomy has largely been put to rest in academic circles.

So I find it far more interesting to consider how and in what conditions this panoply of “Viking” characters arose, to track how our view of the Vikings has shifted. Our interest has never been politically neutral. And so the study of the period carries an inherent responsibility to write about a Viking Age that is not only archaeologically and historically precise, but also socially responsible.

How Ancient Greek Plays Allow us to Reconstruct Europe’s Climate

The open air plays of the ancient Greeks may offer us a valuable insight into the Mediterranean climate of the time, reports new research in Weather.

 Using historical observations from artwork and plays, scientists identified ‘halcyon days’, of theatre friendly weather in mid-winter.


“We explored the weather conditions which enabled the Athenians of the classical era to watch theatre performances in open theatres during the midwinter weather conditions,” said Christina Chronopoulou, from the National and Kapodestrian University of Athens. “We aimed to do so by gathering and interpreting information from the classical plays of Greek drama from 5th and 4th centuries B.C.”

If London were Syria: Save The Children campaign releases unsettling video

Bombs rain on Britain in charity video

 

A young girl is shown in close-up blowing out candles on a birthday cake, playing dress-up and asleep peacefully in a car. Then the images become darker, showing disruption, chaos, bombs and panic as Britain descends into a Syria-type conflict and the girl and her family are forced to flee their home in fear.
 

The images are from a startling new Save The Children campaign that imagines what London would be like if plunged into a conflict similar to that in Syria.

The one-and-a-half minute video was launched in the run-up to the three-year anniversary of the conflict, in which, to date, 10,000 children have lost their lives and 2.3 million people have become refugees.

It closes with the words: "Just because it isn't happening here, doesn't mean it isn't happening."

Museum Hosts Replica of Argo Ship

A museum in the port city of Volos in eastern Greece will host the replica of Argo, the legendary ship propelled by 50 oars-men and sail on which, according to Greek mythology, Jason and the Argonauts sailed from Iolcos to the Black Sea to retrieve the Golden Fleece.
A deadline has expired at the beginning of the month to present an application to take part in the competition called by the city of Volos for projects on the ''Creation of a museum to value the ship of Argo''. The 68 projects - sent from architects in Greece and Italy as well as other countries - will be evaluated next spring and then construction work will begin

'What do you want to be when you grow up?' Children prefer being scientists to soccer stars, study finds

 

Children would rather be scientists than actors and professional sports stars, a survey of parents has found.
 

It reveals that the majority of parents (72 per cent) do not think their children find science lessons boring, while more than two-thirds (67 per cent) claimed their youngsters find the subject exciting.

But it also suggests that nearly one in four (24 per cent) mothers and fathers believe their children find science difficult and the same proportion admit their sons or daughters think it is too much like hard work.