Learning Tips for Students

A lot of things have changed. Today's children have bigger syllabi to learn. Now, learning experts and teachers ask students to read faster and grasp important points.

Here are a few tips for students who have a lot to learn, but very little time.

Make a Timetable

Your timetable should have separate time for eating, playing games, exercise, reading newspaper and study materials. You should not only make a timetable, but also should stick to it.

Give priority to leisure and games in the afternoon, but separate early morning time for studies. Make sure you read all the class notes before you go to bed.

While allotting time to different subjects, allot more time to difficult subjects. You need only less time for the subjects that are easier for you to learn.

Taking Notes

Taking notes is an important part of learning. You need to take lecture notes (classroom notes) and notes from your textbook.

- Go through the lessons on the day before your teacher would teach it in the class. This gives you an idea of what to expect.

- Write down important ideas as bullet points. One word or a phrase is enough to include an idea.

- Give prominence to important ideas by underlining them in your notes.

- Leave lot of space in each face of paper. This will help you add new points later.

- Organize your notes into separate files. Each subject should have a different file. Label the outer page of the file with name of the subject and your teacher. You should also neatly organize each file according to chapters and topics.

- Read the notes (important points) in the night, before going to bed. Read only once. This helps you memorize the lessons clearly.

- While taking notes from a book, label the name of the book and author. Also, note the page number next to your notes. It makes it easy for you to refer to the book three or six months later.

Reading Techniques

You need to read fast and grasp more things. Here are some pointers to fast reading.

- Note the name of the book and its author in the reading log.

- Take a quick look from cover to cover to identify the important chapters.

- Take a quick look over the chapter, identify the important points, and note them down.

- Read the lesson fast. To increase the speed of learning, pass your eyes through the top of the letters and not through the centre. For example, while reading, pass your eyes through the area where the dot above the letter i appears and not through the loop of the letter o.

- Don't take notes while reading.

- Don't go back to read a word or a sentence. If you don't get the idea of the subject, you can come back to the sentence after you finish reading the chapter. Never look up a dictionary while in the middle of reading a chapter. Refer dictionary only if you don't automatically understand the meaning of a word after finishing the paragraph and the chapter.

- Note down the points you remember. Now check if you have taken all the important points, with another fast reading.

How to increase memory

Try to understand completely what you read or hear.

Repeat what you hear or read in your mind.

Make notes of what you learn at school or read from books. A single word can help you remember a whole idea.

Give number to the points

Don't try to bring to memory all the things you have learned. Learn the technique of bringing to memory one thing at a time.

How to increase concentration

Mental concentration is important to memory and better learning.

Stick to your reading timetable. You should separate a specific place and specific time of the day for reading.

Sit erect. It increases your concentration.

Don't allow disturbances like phone calls, music etc while reading.

Concentrate on the lessons you read. Don't think about the next book you have to read while you are reading a book. A better way is to make an order of the books and lessons to read and arrange them in order before you start reading.

Immediately after reading a paragraph, try to recall the idea from that paragraph. This helps you concentrate more on your reading.

Ideal conditions for reading/learning

A silent location that you don't use for sleeping, eating or leisure purposes is the most ideal condition for reading.

Install a fluorescent tube light in the reading room. This helps mild light to fall evenly all over the room. Don't sit in the darkness while reading. If you use table lamp, arrange it towards your left if you are a right-hander.

Arrange the papers, pencils, boards and books on the table before you start reading.

Never try to read while you are tired or ill.

Eat healthy food rich in carbohydrates, proteins and fibres. Replace fast food, pizza, burger, chocolates, ice creams, etc with fresh fruits, whole grain food items (like chapatti), milk, fruit juices, etc.

Exercise daily. Swimming, cycling and jogging are good for students. Practise yoga. It increases concentration and willpower.

Don't watch TV. Instead, play some games in the outdoors. While TV makes you dumb, the games make you smarter.

Read lot of books. Read classic stories, fables (like Aesop fables, Panchatantra stories, etc), etc. Don't spend too much time on comic cartoons.

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Courtesy http://www.streetdirectory.com

Textbooks published by the Department of School Education, Govt. of Tamil Nadu are hosted in this website for viewing purpose.

http://www.textbooksonline.tn.nic.in/

http://dge.tn.gov.in/schoolsyllabus/

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Boosting bacteria in drinking water may improve health

Every gallon of purified drinking water is home to hundreds of millions of bacteria. Water treatment facilities try to remove them – but perhaps encouraging some of the microbes to grow could benefit human health.

Lutgarde Raskin of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor says that workers at water treatment facilities across the US try to destroy all of the bacteria in drinking water with infusions of chlorine and other disinfectants. But this is nearly impossible to achieve with the current technology.

The present approach also ignores the fact that the drinking water microbiome contains some bacteria that can be beneficial. For instance, nitrates that can contaminate drinking water could be converted by some bacteria into harmless nitrogen gas. Raskin and her team suggest that encouraging the growth of these bacteria in drinking water could actually improve the quality and safety of the product.

Between April and October 2010, the researchers analysed bacterial DNA in drinking water treated at municipal facilities in Ann Arbor. They wanted to work out exactly which bacteria were present, and what factors influenced the abundance of the various components of the bacterial community.

They found that slightly altering the water's pH during the filtration process, or even changing how filters were cleaned, helped good bacteria outcompete more harmful microorganisms for the limited resources in the water.

"It does no good to try to remove bacteria entirely," says Raskin. "We are suggesting that a few simple changes can be made that will give bacteria that are good for human health an edge over harmful competitors."
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Courtesy New Scientist

Logic blooms with new 11-set Venn diagram

A new rose has blossomed in the garden of mathematics: a flowery Venn diagram for 11 sets of objects.

Venn diagrams use overlapping circles to show all possible relationships between sets. But diagrams for more than two or three sets often require circles to be stretched, squeezed and turned in on themselves to cover the increased number of set relationships.

Such geometrical gymnastics were distasteful to British logician John Venn, who created the diagrams in 1880. What's more, the results of these mathematical acrobatics tend to be too elaborate to be useful.

So, instead, mathematicians hunt for symmetrical diagrams, which are easier to understand and are proven to exist only for Venn diagrams with a prime number of sets. For purity's sake, these diagrams must also be "simple", meaning no more than two curves cross at any point.

Lucky strike

Previously, examples for simple, symmetric Venn diagrams with five and seven sets had been found – but no higher. Now Khalegh Mamakani and Frank Ruskey at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, have hit on the first simple, symmetric 11-set Venn diagram (pictured).

One of the sets is outlined in white, and the colours correspond to the number of overlapping sets. The team called their creation Newroz, Kurdish for "the new day". The name also sounds like "new rose" in English, reflecting the diagram's flowery appearance.

To find the rose-like diagram, the pair had to comb through myriad potential diagrams, represented as lists of numbers corresponding to the way the curves cross. Sifting through all of the possibilities for an 11-set diagram would be an impossible task even for the combined might of Earth's computers, so the researchers narrowed the options by restricting the search to diagrams with a property called crosscut symmetry, meaning that a segment of each set crosses all the other sets exactly once.

Hardcore geometer

The same method has been used to find simple, symmetric seven-set diagrams. Still, the researchers knew there were no guarantees of success. "After searching for them for so long, the big surprise was to find one at all," says Ruskey.

"I love the picture," says Peter Cameron , a mathematician at Queen Mary, University of London. He says the computational techniques used to find Newroz might prove useful in representing other complex geometric objects.

However, the diagram itself is unlikely to have direct practical applications. "We use two and three-set Venn diagrams for working out simple logical puzzles," Cameron says. "Beyond that, I don't think anyone but the most hardcore geometer would use a Venn diagram."
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Courtesy New Scientist

Synthetic 'upgrade' for fruit fly's DNA

The genetic code of the fruit fly Drosophila has been hacked into, allowing it to make proteins with properties that don't exist in the natural world. The advance could ultimately lead to the creation of new or "improved" life forms in the burgeoning field of synthetic biology.

The four letters of the genetic code, A, C, T and G, are read in triplets, called codons, by the cell's protein-making machinery. Each codon gives an instruction for the type of amino acid that gets added next in a protein chain, or tells the machinery to stop.

Jason Chin at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, and colleagues previously showed that it was possible to reassign one of these stop codons to incorporate an "unnatural" amino acid instead, and last year they engineered nematode worms to manufacture such proteins.

Complex proposition

However, fruit flies are a much more complex proposition. "They contain significantly more neurons; they can learn; they have all sorts of complicated behaviours," says Chin. "Many of the things we've discovered in biology have actually been discovered in flies."

Now, as a proof of principle, Chin's team has engineered fruit flies that incorporated three new amino acids into proteins in the cells of their ovaries.

The flies were engineered using bacteria that had been modified to insert the genetic code for the unnatural amino acid into the fly DNA. There was no apparent impact on the flies' health, and they even produced healthy offspring that also made the new protein chains.

"This work provides a very significant expansion on our capability to manipulate and alter proteins involved in specific cellular and developmental processes. It will provide new insights into human disease mechanisms, memory and ageing," says Paul Freemont of the Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation at Imperial College London.

Bulletproof flies

None of the amino acids were particularly remarkable, but the fact that engineering the flies had no obvious impact on their health suggests that many more useful amino acids could be similarly incorporated.

For example, work in bacterial cells has shown that it is possible to incorporate unnatural amino acids that cross-link to each other or turn an enzyme's activity on or off when a light is shone on them. Doing this in a complex organism like a fly could shed new light on how proteins interact within cells, or how rapidly turning an enzyme on or off affects the cell's function.

The technique could even be used to create animals with new or improved properties, although that is probably some years off. "We're not going to be creating bulletproof flies or anything like that in the short term," says Chin.
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Courtesy New Scientist

Mathematics is as rich as literature

Many gifted writers have attempted to translate mathematical thinking into terms ungifted readers can understand. Daniel Tammet's unassuming new volume of essays, reminiscences and stories reveals the enormity of their failure. Thinking in Numbers is unprecedented: a pitch-perfect duet between mathematics and literature. More than that: it is a hybrid. Something new.

Thinking in Numbers reflects Tammet's career-long refusal to accept that mathematical imaginings are somehow special, abstruse, removed from human reality. A synaesthete, a polyglot and a memory man - he once recited pi to 22,514 decimal places, setting a European record - Tammet insists his highly functioning autistic mind is normal. The differences, such as they are, between his thoughts and most other people's are to do with the kind of attention he brings to the world. Numbers have texture, colour and character. Whether we pay attention to these qualities, explore them and enjoy them, is a little bit to do with our genetic inheritance, much more to do with our schooling, and ultimately down to personal choice.  All of us think mathematically all the time. To be "afraid of numbers" is a pose, a position, an aesthetic choice, as surely as not "getting" jazz, or condemning this or that kind of art as "rubbish".

For a book that shines a bitterly bright light on our cultural philistinism, there is a surprising lack of didacticism here, and not a squeak of bad temper. These essays are by turns playful and confessional (as when Tammet, the man with the supposedly supercharged brain, singularly fails to predict the simplest actions of his own mother). There are several virtuosic performances. (Noticing that Shakespeare would have been one of the first English schoolchildren to learn about zero, Tammet reinterprets and elucidates some of the poet-playwright's most powerful and moving verse.) But Tammet, though he appreciates the stage magician's art, is not a natural showman. He prefers persuasion, conversation and the recording of subtleties.

The mathematics in his stories is often very simple indeed, as when he observes, with intense attention and compassion, how a friend struggles with and finally solves a trivia puzzle. One senses Tammet's loneliness at these moments: he inhabits a world of great variety and beauty, but gets pitifully few visitors. We do not approach novels, or even poetry, as timorously as we approach mathematics, though Tammet convincingly demonstrates that the three forms are very closely related, with bonds far stronger and more demonstrable than those that supposedly bind maths to music.

Elsewhere Tammet inclines towards slightly melancholy subjects: the ephemerality of snowflakes; the vain idealism that fuels the creation of unbuildable cities; the self-deceptions sewn through Frank Drake's scientific-looking formula, asserting the chances of there being other intelligent life in the universe.

Thinking in Numbers is not about mathematics per se. It is about the mathematical component of lived experience. It is about the curious sensual ways we measure the world (for example, the preponderance of G-words "to describe things which are 'great', or 'grand', 'gross' or 'gargantuan'"); the littleness of the individual in the face of pi; the rhetorical satisfactions of a well-turned theorem; the primes that power certain kinds of poetry.

Mathematics, Tammet says, is illimitable. It is a language through which the human imagination expresses itself. Presumably this means mathematics has, or deserves, a literature.  In Tammet, it already has a laureate.

Courtesy New Scientist www.edufine.net

Holding on to faulty protein delays brain degeneration

When something goes wrong in your brain, you'd think it would be a good idea to get rid of the problem. Turns out, sometimes it's best to keep hold of it. By preventing faulty proteins from being destroyed, researchers have delayed the symptoms of a degenerative brain disorder.

SNAP25 is one of three proteins that together make up a complex called SNARE, which plays a vital role in allowing neurons to communicate with each other. In order to work properly, all the proteins must be folded in a specific way. CSP alpha is one of the key proteins that ensures SNAP25 is correctly folded.

Cells have a backup system to deal with any misfolded proteins – they are destroyed by a bell-shaped enzyme called a proteasome, which pulls the proteins inside itself and breaks them down.

People with a genetic mutation that affects the CSP alpha protein – and its ability to correctly fold SNAP25 – can develop a rare brain disorder called neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis (NCL). The disorder causes significant damage to neurons – people affected gradually lose their cognitive abilities and struggle to move normally.

To find out what role proteasomes might play in NCL, Manu Sharma and his colleagues at Stanford University in California blocked the enzyme in mice that were bred to lack CSP alpha. "We weren't sure what would happen," says Sharma. Either the misfolded SNAP25 would accumulate and harm the cells, or some of the misfolded proteins may work well enough to retain some of their function.

Longer life

It appears it was the latter. Mice bred to lack CSP alpha suffer the same physical and cognitive problems as humans, and tend to survive for about 65 to 80 days, rather than the normal 670 days. But mice injected with a drug that blocked protease lived, on average, an extra 15 days. "Fifteen days might not sound like much, but as a percentage it's quite significant," says Sharma. What's more, treated mice were able to stave off measurable movement and cognitive symptoms for an extra 10 days.

The finding goes against the idea that neurodegenerative disorders should be treated by clearing away misfolded proteins, rather than trying to rescue their function. "People normally think that protease isn't working hard enough," says Nico Dantuma at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, who was not involved in the study.

But whether or not the drugs are likely to work in other neurodegenerative disorders involving aggregations of misfolded proteins, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, is up for debate. "I don't think their results prove that clearing misfolded proteins is not a useful therapeutic," says Ana Maria Cuervo at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Other studies that increase the degrading of misfolded proteins have been shown to improve symptoms in other neurodegenerative diseases, she says.

"There are two sides of the coin," says Dantuma. "You might rescue functioning proteins from being degraded... but it's too early to extrapolate these results to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease."

In the meantime, drugs that block proteasome are already used to treat cancer, so Sharma hopes they can soon be trialled in people with NCL.

Courtesy New Scientist
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