Re: follow up

dear jeffrey

thanks for thinking about how to help. i am considering two non-profits, one the school that i mentioned where there is a possibility of creating a center for cognitive enhancement and brain plasticity. here is the link to their donation site: http://www.penikese.org/donate/ways-to-give/

would this work?

here are a few questions:

1. could you do 75k or 100k? with this amount, we could really develo= the tools to have a suite of tasks targeting specific aspects of brai= plasticity and enhancement, with elegant interfaces.
2. would you set up the so-to-speak constraints, that the funds be targeted specifically for the work i wish to do, or would this come from me?
3. do you imagine carving off some amount of the contribution to the place itself so that they feel as if they are getting something as well? of course, they are getting something potentially big with t=e program i am bringing, but ....

i am meeting with the other organization this friday and will have a better sense then.

here is the basic idea, insight, and approach.
Brain plasticity, self-control, and the reduction of career criminals

1. career criminals cost society $1-2 million dollars each.
2. career criminals reveal signature of self-control problem: repeated offenses despite punishments, interventions, etc. Self-control problems are the single best predictor of career criminals
3. capacity for self-control matures over development; youths have best shot of change due to neural plasticity
4. if we can prevent youth crimes or arrest recidivism, massive savings; this is an international problem, so there is opportunity fo= work abroad as well.
5. early assessments of self-control are highly predictive of future delinquency
   6, self-control as an exhaustible short term resource... like fast twitch muscles
6. self-control like long term slow muscle for strength and suppor= and can be strengthened
7. we have powerfully reliable and predictive assessment tools for self-control
8. we have a rich set of tasks that can improve self-control, specifically targeting brain plasticity and mechanisms for inhibitory regulation.

Put 1-9 together and we have a model for both early prevention of crimes as well as for reducing recidivism.

Goal: to develop more sophisticated, computer-based tools to assess and intervene on self-control and reduce crime, especially the number of career criminals that cost society millions of dollars.

best,

marc

I think your better place and future is with all the money now wasted on charter schools.. you can posit that individiualss have different learning methods. these methods MUST be front and center, so one is not attempting to insert Apple software in to Pc hardware. tough example, I =elive afro american learn kinestically, . if you let them jump around the clas=. they will do better.. the first thing we do is tell them to sit in one plac= and listen.. you can deal with the gender differnces in math learning.

STAY away from criminal work. It will be bad for you. I cannot do that as a test... no amount is carved out by definition , but it is totally up t= you tonegotiate terms and conditions.

jeffrey

the stuff i am developing has the potential to go to charters as well. i want to develop software the can do online learning in a very elegant way. Am attaching a sketch of the model. I agree about the mess in education, and many ideas to develop. But need a base to create, and the resources to do it.

the criminal angle is simply one hook to get some funding. but the more important point is that issues of self-control are predictive of academic achievement! low income kids have lower self-control and poor academics. there are powerful techniques to improve self-control, but they have yet to be elegantly developed and applied in the public domain.

how do you propose we move forward? if you donate the funds to the Center that is linked to the Penikese School, I can use to develop these tools and then shop them to all sorts of educational arenas. Teh brain plasticity issue is red hot. Most are focused on working memory because of the application to alzheimer's. No one has really caught on yet to the self-control part, but it is ripe for developing applications. I just need the resources to bring the relevant players on board and make this happen.

thoughts?

marc

call at 8 give me anumber

m