Evidently, the video author, Magda Havas, published a paper in 2013 documenting "adverse health effects" of electromagnetic field (EMF):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23675629

First of all, I do not have access to the paper, unfortunately. However, the journal (Electromagn Biol Med.) has a pretty low impact factor (0.814), which means that it is not a very respectable journal. Dr. Havas' 3 most recent papers to date were published in exactly the same journal (see here). I would say that speaks volumes to the quality of her research. Another paper of hers:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24192494

The journal (Reviews on Environment Health) has no registered impact factor, which, again, indicates that it is not a respectable journal. I have no access to this article either. I tried to search on her website, but there is no PDF of most of her scientific papers, only the listing. The only PDFs I could find are about white papers (mostly descriptive, not much formal research), policy papers, petitions, etc.

Secondly, the abstract of the first paper seems to indicate that she used subjective measures, which can be highly unreliable. She claims, in both papers, that the effect is not "psychosomatic" (meaning, not just feelings), but there is no indications of what she actually measured (from the abstract). The mention about rouleau formation, heart palpitations, etc. feels like very cursory mention about several conditions. Rouleaux, for example, could be caused by infection or other inflammatory reaction. Has she ruled out infection or inflammatory condition in the first place? The details might be in the paper, but I really doubt that she dealt with it. Plus, there is no real control.

Thirdly, her (other, but similar) study has some serious flaws too. You can read a more thorough treatment about it here.

Fourthly, in contrast, another meta study by Rubin et al, which has a much better experimental design, many more subjects (thousands, as opposed to 69 subjects), proper blinding and control, directly contradicts her finding.

Fifthly, another, more respectable study on prenatal exposure (of mice) yielded a negative result. This is consistent to the actual measured bodily specific absorption rate (SAR) 5.01 micro Watt / kg (at 99% level, meaning that the rate is even lower than that 99% of the time), which is well below the FCC standard of 1.6 Watt / kg. The safe threshold of SAR is 4 Watt / kg.

Sixthly, posting scientific results directly to the public via Youtube or other social media without proper peer-review is really an underhanded method to garner private attention. If scientific peers do not approve the method, usually there are some flaws associated with the study. So, I would cast much doubt on such studies (including hers).

All in all, don't be too panicky. Always cross check your sources.

Are gifted children getting lost in the shuffle?

http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2014/01/gifted-children-study/

30-year study reveals clues to the exceptional child’s journey

by Jane Sevier

Excerpt:
Gifted children are likely to be the next generation’s innovators and leaders—yet the exceptionally smart are often invisible in the classroom, lacking the curricula, teacher input and external motivation to reach full potential.

This conclusion comes as the result of the largest scientific study of the profoundly gifted to date, a 30-year study conducted by researchers at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of education and human development.

David Lubinski, professor of psychology and human development at Peabody, led the study, which tracked 300 gifted children from age 13 until age 38, logging their accomplishments in academia, business, culture, health care, science and technology. The results were recently published in a paper titled “Who Rises to the Top? Early Indicators,” in Psychological Science

---
Paper: https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/Kell-Lubinski-Benbow-20132.pdf

Interesting read.

Hi Samyuktha,

Firstly, congratulations on such a great baby! Please also understand that each baby grows differently. At one point, she might be bored in one thing and got interested in another thing. So, I think it's a great time for you to listen to her next interest. Expose her to all possible positive activities that promote learning.

I think that you can stimulate her physical growth by playing in the park, for example. Try also dance for little tots or baby gym. Doing a lot of exercise would improve focus and increase blood flow to the brain (which is usually a good thing for kids). Plus, she might reach a phase that she needs her gross motoric skill to grow too.

Another thing to try is to grow her social and emotional skills. Arrange a lot of play dates. See her flourish socially and help her handle emotional reactions too.

Although she's "bored" in "academic stuff", you may still try to read her a couple of books by the end of the day. Make it super fun. Try fun "activity books" like Tickle Monster. Another trick that you may try is: Hand puppets. Talk to her through her favorite hand puppet and then have the puppet read a book to her.

I wouldn't worry about science for now, but try introducing her to a concept of counting. Mainly, how to connect real quantities to numbers. When my kid was about 15 month old, she could recite numbers up to 13 correctly, but she could hardly connect those numbers to real quantities, like 3 apples. She now can, thankfully. So, try to teach that first using Marshmallow Math. When that real-abstract connection is made, you can proceed with teaching logic, which primarily operates in abstract realm. Once the logic is strong, you can get into science. Without logic, teaching science almost feels like having the kid regurgitating facts, which is not really useful at all.

For the music front, nursery rhymes are okay, I would say. Get her hooked to music first. Wide exposure is the key at this moment and gauge her interest.

Here's an abbreviated transcript:

Children lose the capacity of not afraid of being wrong. Such capacity is necessary for creativity. We penalize mistakes and thereby we are educating people out of their capacity (toward creativity). Every education system in the world has the same hierarchy: Math and literacy at the top, humanities next, and arts at the bottom. There's a hierarchy within the arts themselves---arts and music have higher   status than drama and dance. No school teaches dance to children the way we teach mathematics. Dance is equally as important as math.

Our education system is predicated on the academic ability. Our education system was founded in 19th century to meet the needs of industrialism. The hierarchy is predicated in two ideas:
1. The most useful subject for work is at the top. Kids are ushered out of things that they like but are not useful for getting a job.
2. Academic ability comes to dominate our view of intelligence (because the university is designed in their image). Consequently many talented, brilliant people think that they're not because the thing they're good at at school wasn't valued and always stigmatized.

We can't afford to go on that way. In the next 30 years, according to the UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. With the combination of the technology and its transformation effect on work, demography, and huge explosion of population, suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything. Jobs that required a B.A. now requires an M.A, while those that required an M.A. now requires a Ph.D. It's a process of academic inflation. This is an indication that the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.

We know three things about intelligence:
1. It's diverse.
2. It's dynamic. Intelligence is interactive. Brain is not divided into compartments. Creativity, which I defined as the process of having valuable original ideas, more often than not comes about through the interaction of multi-disciplinary way of seeing things.
3. It's distinct.

Talk about Gillian Lynne of how she came about to discover her talents in dancing. She was constantly fidgeting. Today she would've been categorized as ADHD, be put on medication and told to calm down.

Our hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we stripped mines the earth for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't service. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. Primarily through preserving the human imagination and creative capacity for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are.
Our task is to educate the whole being so that they can face the future. We may not see this future, but they will. Our job is to help them make something of it.

His talk is entertaining and it's almost "preaching to the choir". He's outlining a well known problem that everybody already knows. If you read the transcript: he's only offering a vague solution to the problem he outlined. So vague that we cannot put the solution into action. Consequently, I think that while his talk is entertaining, it is less informative.

If you have an hour to spare, watch this seminar. It is very good. I don't want to spoil it.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/DrOt9MA3slM&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/DrOt9MA3slM&rel=1</a>

For LR and Reading Bear: Shorter segments, usually 4 sessions (meaning, LR = 2 days worth of teaching, Reading Bear = 4 little boxes in the middle). The rest are played one DVD per session. I also got a very positive result with Preschool Prep.

Alternative link for the second paper. This is a landmark paper cited by 53 other papers at the time of this writing.

Accordingly, theories of reading acquisition amply recognise the importance of phoneme awareness in the establishment of the reading system (e.g., Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Ehri, 1998; Harm & Seidenberg, 1999; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005).

This emphasizes the importance of phonics approach.

It is now widely acknowledged that the relationship between phoneme awareness and reading acquisition is strong (e.g., Ehri, 2005, for a review) and bi-directional : phoneme awareness develops with literacy instruction and in turn the development of phoneme awareness improves reading acquisition. However, several studies have shown a decreasing role of phoneme awareness on reading performance, together with an increasing role of other factors -- such as rapid naming (de Jong & Van Der Leij, 2003; Kirby, Parrila, & Pfeiffer, 2003) or morphological awareness (Casalis & Louis-Alexandre, 2000; Deacon & Kirby, 2004; Sénéchal & Kearnan, 2007; Singson, Mahony, & Mann, 2000) -- with age and reading improvement. These results suggest that phonological skills well account for individual differences in early decoding, but that, in addition to phonological skills, the development of fluent reading through increased orthographic knowledge might involve some other kind of cognitive skills. In line with this view, it has been shown that controlling for decoding skills does not exclude variability in orthographic knowledge (Barker, Torgesen, & Wagner, 1992; Olson, Wise, Conners, & Rack, 1990) and that early orthographic knowledge predicts later orthographic knowledge even after controlling for early decoding skills (Cunningham, Perry, Stanovich, & Share, 2002; Sprenger-Charolles, Siegel, Béchennec, & Serniclaes, 2003).

I take this statement as "sight word approach is useful, but has its limits as the kids grow older".

Some neuropsychological data also suggest that factors other than phonological skills could be involved in fluent reading acquisition. ... It follows that acquisition of whole word knowledge, allowing fluent reading, seems to rely only partly on decoding skills and phoneme awareness and probably involves additional cognitive skills not yet fully understood.

I take this statement as "phonics and sight word / whole word approach is not the entire story."

There's a very nice background / review in the first 5 pages of the paper. I'd suggest you read the paper.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23593117

I think this is a great study confirming that visual attention (VA) span is highly correlated with reading speed, both in normal and dyslexic context. I'd say that this is a landmark paper that confirms VA theory. Basically, what this paper (and the VA theory) says that to increase reading speed, we must increase the kids' VA span. Visual short term memory (VSTM) does not increase reading speed, but does correlate with VA span. I think this means that VSTM aids in the reading comprehension rather than in reading speed.

A similar result in dyslexic kids with some nice background and hints: http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ835884

I would say that it is better to have varieties to keep the kids from being bored. The most important part is to keep learning fun. My current problem is that to keep the fun part since my kid feels that reading is boring.

I've used all the products you mentioned. My kid isn't very interested in LR (sadly), but loves YBCR and "meh" on Monkisee. She loves Sparkabilities, but gets bored after about 2-3 months or so. Memory Magic doesn't catch her interest at all. She loves Reading Bear at first and is getting bored with it now. We do Reading Bear from the start and she's currently at the silent e parts.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22219529

Abstract: Flash cards have been shown to be useful for teaching sight-word reading. To date, the most effective flash-card instruction method is incremental rehearsal (IR). This method involves the instructor interspersing unknown stimulus items into the presentation of known stimulus items. In this study, we compared IR to a modified IR procedure-strategic incremental rehearsal (SIR)-to determine whether the effects of IR might be improved by incorporating variables likely to increase word acquisition. These included increased opportunities to respond to unknown stimuli, using learner responding as a basis for changing instructional items, and systematic prompting methods. An A-B-A-B design was used to compare the effects of IR and SIR for increasing sight-word reading with 4 elementary school students. Results indicated that students read more words correctly with SIR than with IR. In addition, similar patterns of responding were seen at a 2-week follow-up.


Comment:
This is one of the few studies investigating strategies on flash cards-based learning methods on normal kids (no autism or mental retardation). The sample size is very small (n = 4), but is interesting nonetheless.

I think it is important to know that what your kids' want or need may be different than yours. Having good grades in school simply opens up possibilities for your kids should they want to be doctors, engineers, scientists, or businessmen, for example. In short, you never know what they aspire to be until much later and you want to open the door of opportunity as wide and early as possible for them. And that requires some great education---and EL is definitely one of the key.

Sorry, I haven't been able to reply in the last few days. Frukc's article summarizes the study pretty well: it is a landmark study that really proves that fluid intelligence can be trained and is dose-dependent.

By the way, the Dual-N-Back exercise is available for download here. The webpage currently features 4 different replication studies that have been done since the publication of the paper. It is replicable.

Back to the write-up. The blog article that Frukc linked had 5 points (see Frukc's answer) that directly follow the paper. However, I would caution that these points (seek novelty, self challenge, creative thinking, do things "the hard way", and "network") are highly informal and probably may never be directly testable through research. Also, some of the papers cited for plausibility are somewhat tenuous---at least to me.

What we know so far is that Gf (fluid intelligence) is an amalgamation of many different skills, with working memory as the nexus (or perhaps the essential "reservoir"). Such skills are controlled through "central circuitry" called the "executive function" (EF), whose definition is still not yet settled (though there are several models). To increase Gf, we will need to increase the efficiency and the capacity of the EF, for sure, in addition to increasing the capacity and efficiency of the working memory. The problem is: How? That's especially true for the first part (EF training). Once we are exposed to brain-training exercises, we somehow develop some strategies against them and we execute them over and over again. As such, these exercises lose their novelty quickly---I think this is why previous papers show that there are no evidence in brain-training exercises improving Gf. This is why novelty requirement (and therefore self-challenge and do things the hard way) kicks in---it forces our brain to grow. The problem is how to define novelty: What is novel? Is synthesis over several different things enough to be considered as novel? I guess that the novelty context varies amongst individuals and the novelty that forces the brain to grow is what we are seeking.

On "Thinking Creatively": The cited Sternberg paper (this one) is quite interesting. Especially the "What is teaching for successful intelligence" section. He outlines several key ideas:
1. Teaching for memory learning (Recall, recognize, match, verify, repeat)
2. Teaching for analytical learning (Analyze, evaluate, explain, compare/contrast, judge)
3. Teaching for creative learning (Create, invent, explore, imagine, suppose, synthesize)
4. Teaching for practical learning (Put into practice, use, implement, apply)

I can see that these teaching ideas would work (and he shows that they work by citing previous papers). The main idea is banking on the memory training and force the EF to organize around the memory reservoir. Since it somehow resonates with some EF model (esp. the Working Memory Model), such strategies would work. However, it is not sufficient to stop right there---especially more so since we have quite a number of EF models defined (see wiki). For sure we would need emotional and social intelligence since EF also involves self-inhibition / regulation. On top of that, there are attention / focus, task switching, etc. However, there's a paper that hinted that all these are manifestations of the same root ability, I am still a little skeptical about it (primarily about the analysis method---they used a version of factor analysis, which can be problematic to explain).

Anyway...

So, to conclude, I think the consensus on training Gf (and EF) is still not there yet. The five points are a good start.

Tech sector is very volatile---one year you have a job, another year you can be out of the job. Remember the dot bomb era? Unless you own the tech company (in which case, it can't fire you unless you no longer own it), I'd say that having a tech job without a college degree is risky, even if the job is pulling a 6 figure salary per year. That said, college degree is still needed if you're seeking jobs conventionally, for added security. Besides, the unemployment rate difference between college graduates vs. high-school graduates still shows the benefit of college, after all.

Article.

Landmark study, good experiment design. This paper basically says that you can train your fluid intelligence, which is far more important than crystallized intelligence. In light of the earlier post I made, training working memory is essential, but it is not enough to stop there (and this paper affirms it). There are evidence for focus and other factors.

Article #1

Article #2

Abstract + scientific article (if you have access)

Wikipedia article about fluid and crystallized intelligence.

This is huge. This article is basically saying that top school is mostly training their students to regurgitate the knowledge they crammed into them and thereby increasing their working memory capabilities. The implication is: Kids of average intelligence can be made academically successful through rigorous training (and a host of other implications).