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Einstein wasn’t dyslexic – the cult of ‘Genius by Association’

A.A. Gill has written a great article in the Sunday Times magazine about his hidden dyslexia and the effect it has had upon his life. It’s undoubtedly a very brave act for someone who earns their crust solely (I believe) from writing and he makes many thought provoking points about the the UK Dept of Education’s attitude to dealing with this and other learning disabilities, regardless of their official position.

It’s a brave article but contains 2 points that really irked me. The first is the assertion that dyslexia doesn’t afflict those speaking the Chinese language. It does and a bit of research would have yielded this Scientific American article explaining the differences between Chinese and latin alphabet dyslexia which are possibly 2 different learning disabilities with a similar outcome.

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-14

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-07

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Ireland’s “education deficit”

Could write a book about this I’ll keep it to a single rambling post! I was reading this article in today’s Irish Times. The conclusion appears to be that we don’t have a world class education system and that some tech companies are finding recent graduates poor. This was described by Craig Barrett at the Farmleigh conference last year and more recently at the described December 2009 meeting between the management of tech multinationals based in Ireland and the minister for education, Batt O’ Keefe.

Many multinationals, O’Keeffe heard, were reluctant to recruit from certain colleges because of concerns about standards. There were even suggestions that several institutes of technology (ITs) and one university were on an unofficial recruitment “blacklist”. At the core of the problem was grade inflation across the education sector, from Leaving Cert to third-level degrees.