New York Times on the Web Forums Science

Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

rshow55 - 02:35pm Aug 13, 2002 EST (#3698 of 3700)

You might try them yourself. The drills aren't text - they test nothing but the transform between "seeing" and "saying" -- and I'm sure you can read them about as fast as you can talk. If you can't - you'd read better if you learned to.

Early on, I prepared drills where at the start there were just two or three words presented and drilled at random. But that seemed too easy and boring -- even for the four year olds. These four year olds would take these sheets, and with a little prompting - drill each other.

In my experience, if the drill by sixes was facile - the drill by 24's was only a little more than a formality - and after a very short time random "see-say" facility for hundreds of words was about as automatic as for the shorter lists.

Of course, these drills aren't reading. But they drill skills reading takes - in a much easier statistical context for learning than the child usually has to master.

rshow55 - 02:36pm Aug 13, 2002 EST (#3699 of 3700)

I first prepared these drills for myself. I needed to relearn the skills these drills taught - on two occasions -- as an adult. A fascinating experience I wouldn't wish on anybody. I read OK now.

rshow55 - 02:45pm Aug 13, 2002 EST (#3700 of 3700)

The neural process involved in learning a word taken from "the amorphous content" of a stream of language flow -- combining it with the context it is associated with - both verbal and physical - and somehow sorting it out in terms of meaning and grammer over weeks, along with hundreds of even a few thousand other words is much more complicated - and involves much more confusion - many more "false connections" -- than the stripped down statistical process involved in learning "see-say" correspondences in drills like those above. Though getting that "see-say" correspondence is complicated enough.

In some ways, anyway, people are very smart.

We can build on that.

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense