A tale of two guns.

I read, with some recognition, of the sobering tale of David Lubin, an actor, who found himself in a perilous situation on set, recently. Mr. Lubin had been playing a masked gunman, whilst “shooting”, in Alpha Market, in the Cole Valley area of San Francisco. Unfortunately, for Mr. Lubin, a local resident was strangely observant and unobservant at the same time: they saw his gun, but didn’t see the camera crew attending to him. The local reported a crime in progress and the police responded.

Now, Mr. Lubin was not expecting real life police to turn up. When asked to drop his gun, under gunpoint, he froze and neither moved nor complied. Luckily for him, the police decided to disarm him, rather than shoot him. He was arrested – but not charged when the police found out the true situation.

I note that quite a few Internet commenters chimed in with remarks about police brutality, heavy-handedness and general stupidity. However, that is not what I saw in this situation. I see a remarkably and very fortunate restraint in the police response. Had the police been as they are so often portrayed, Mr. David Lubin would now have the credentials R.I.P after his name.

In contrast, I would like to remind you of the case of Kirk Abella, an actor in the British film “Going Somewhere” who went somewhere he didn’t expect: the afterlife. Kirk Abella was shot dead on a film set in the Philippines under almost identical circumstances. Kirk was playing a gunman on a motorbike, when a local resident reported a crime underway. A community watchman, Eddie Cuizon, gave chase and shot the actor in the back, when he saw a gun being drawn. The gun, of course, was a plastic replica. Cuizon gave himself up to the police when he finally understood what he had done. He was charged with murder.

Curiously, community watchmen in the Philippines are not even supposed to be armed. They are supposed to carry nothing more than batons. So, it seems that Eddie Cuizon took his own initiative to arm himself. No doubt that won’t look too good at sentencing.

These two tales make me reflect that David Lubin was very lucky indeed. He could so easily be a dead man, today. Worringly, the film that David Lubin had been working on, had all the right permits for shooting. Apparently, though, this information didn’t reach the policemen on the ground.

I hope that lessons are learnt from these two cases. Policemen should always try to make an arrest, of a living suspect, if at all possible and should not do as Eddie Cuizon – shoot first, and find out later what it was all about.

I am led to wonder how many actors, on film sets, have been harmed by the police, the world over. After all, most contemporary films seem to involve guns. So, out of the hundreds of thousands of fake gun crimes, on film sets around the world each year – how many of them lead to police intervention? It is a worrying thought. If anyone has the answer, please respond below.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175

To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

Are there real child prodigies?

This question was asked by a searcher from Texas, Dallas. Funnily enough, that search brought him to my entry on “Does Ainan Cawley exist?”, which was a search by another searcher who doubted the reality of child prodigies.

Now, I am going to make an assumption about why this question was asked. I put it down to the influence of television and film. In Hollywood, so many varieties of “hero” are deployed in films, that, perhaps for an uninformed viewer, it can become difficult to distinguish a cape wearing “superhero” – obviously fictional – from a child prodigy – which they may also categorize, therefore, as another variety of fictional hero. It may be that the effect of television by promoting such characters as “Dougie Howser”, for instance, is to undermine the very believability, in the public eye, of the notion of a child prodigy. The prodigy becomes nothing more real than any other fictional “superhero”.

There are real child prodigies. Though, there may not be a child as qualified as a doctor, as young as Dougie Howser – simply because it takes too many years to pass through all the hoops, even for the very brightest. There are also child prodigy musicians, in the real world, not just “August Rush” who, in some ways, is less impressive than a real prodigy, like Mozart.

The problem with film is that it can make a true story of a prodigy’s life, seem fictional. So often is the plot of a prodigy’s arc of life used in film, that when it happens in the real world, it can seem too “pat” to people. The public can, as this searcher has, react as if the true story were just another fictional example.

The other problem is that prodigies in fiction are much more common than they are in real life. Thus, the fictional prodigies can set up the expectation that there is a prodigy around every corner. Perhaps my Texan searcher was expressing doubt based on the observation that there WERE’NT prodigies around every corner. Perhaps the dearth of real world prodigies made them think that prodigies didn’t exist at all, outside of film.

If prodigies appeared in film, with the same frequency as they appear in real life, one might reasonably expect to see one prodigy per century of Hollywood output, or so. Thus, it can be seen that the situation in Hollywood films with respect to prodigies is absurd. The films create the expectation of an abundance of one of the rarest manifestations of the human mind. When that expectation is not met, it is understandable that people begin to doubt the phenomenon of prodigy. However, it would be more rational to doubt the phenomenon of Hollywood as a source of reliable information about the world.

The situation of prodigies, is a difficult one in many ways. The problems of adjustment and finding a suitable environment for the child are immense. I am not sure it helps, to have Hollywood creating a false impression of the numbers of such prodigious children in the world. For one thing, if people come to believe that they are plentiful the tendency might be to neglect those prodigies they do come across, for people might think that such children are actually fairly “ordinary”!

Then again, Hollywood is at least making people aware of the concept of prodigy, if to an unhelpful degree and in a misleading fashion. However, the “education” received from Hollywood distorts every phenomenon it touches – prodigy included – so that the nature of the truth in the real world, is obscured. The answer, here, of course, would be to look beyond Hollywood at more reliable forms of media, such as newspapers, to gather information about the phenomenon of prodigy – or, indeed, any other matter on which Hollywood touches. The problem, of course, is that films and tv are so easy to imbibe and that newspapers take more of an effort to consume. Thus it is, as reading declines, the power of Hollywood to form people’s minds grows, to the point at which, perhaps, their “understanding” of the world, becomes something almost entirely ficitional: they no longer know what is real, and what is not. They no longer have the capacity to decide whether the matters addressed in Hollywood have real world counterparts or not.

Child prodigies are real. What is not realistic, is Hollywood’s portrayal of them. It is worrying that, in the modern world, people are losing their ability to come to this realization.

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.htmland here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175

To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

Does Ainan Cawley exist?

This might seem like a strange question for the father of said child to ask…but it wasn’t me who asked it. An Internet surfer arrived on my blog a couple of weeks ago, using the search terms: “Does Ainan Cawley exist?”. Amusingly, for me at least, they only read one page. I think the existence of this blog, alone, was enough to answer their question.

Now, it would be interesting to be able to discuss where this person was from – but their visit record notes their country of origin as “unknown” and their continent as “unknown”. This sometimes happens, though it is more usual for complete details to be available. So, I can’t make any anthropological observations, of any kind, in this regard. Yet, I can say this: that someone would be led to wonder whether Ainan Cawley exists, does lead me to think they have a very limited understanding of the possibilities inherent in humans.

“Humanity” is a very broad category, in some ways. There are those completely incapable of speech, or coordinated movement, of intelligence more rudimentary than some other animals, that we would still call human. Then there are those whose capabilities so far exceed the norm, that some people, like my unknown surfer, are led to question whether they are merely legendary.

In most parts of the world, these days, the expectations and requirements of children at particular ages, are standardized. Education has become codified and “set in stone”. We come to know what to expect of children of different ages. Differences between children, in such a regime, can end up being hidden, because nothing new is demanded of children capable of delivering more: they are all required to do the same and so, in some ways, end up looking the same. In such a world, it is easy to overlook the huge differences that exist between children, in their innate abilities. Then again there is the question of rarity. A child like Ainan has occurred but once, to my knowledge, in Singapore, a city of five million people. Now, very few Singaporeans, for instance, have had the chance to meet Ainan…perhaps only hundreds, to the low thousands, have personally encountered him, in the course of his life. Were it not, therefore, for the media, having covered him, in his native country, it would be unsurprising, if some of the millions of Singaporeans who had not met him, might be led to wonder if his story was true, or some kind of modern fable. In fact, funnily enough, in the early days, I did see rather paranoid comments on forums from Singaporeans positing the idea that Ainan was some kind of PAP propaganda campaign. It never occurred to them that the PAP would never choose a NON-Chinese boy for such a representative role, thus it is quite impossible that such should be the actual circumstance. However, it is interesting that these commenters thought it more likely that Ainan was a PAP fabrication, than that they thought him real. Nowadays, however, I see no such comments, so it seems Singaporeans have come to accept his reality.

The essential problem with children like Ainan is that they are so rare, in the human population, that the typical person will NEVER meet such a child, in their entire lifetimes. They will only hear of them second hand, as rumours, or press stories. They will never have any real, verifiable, personal contact with them. Instead, their experience will be defined by the more common varieties of “giftedness” that they meet. Everyone, for instance, we will meet many moderately gifted children, in their lifetimes (rarity 1 in 44). So, it is understandable if people’s view of what a gifted child is and can do, is formed by what they observe that moderately gifted children are and can do. Yet, the difference between the category of child that Ainan fits into, and a moderately gifted child, is much greater than the difference between a moderately gifted child and an average one. People, however, having no experience of this distinction, have no insight into just how different children like Ainan are from the typical “gifted” child that they have met.

My blog traffic is very informative as to how people view prodigious children and geniuses in general. For instance quite a common search to arrive on my blog is the question: “Did Leonardo da Vinci exist?”. It may startle you that people can frame this question, despite the plethora of physical and written evidence of his work and life, that still exists today. Yet, people question his reality, because they cannot personally conceive of anyone so much more gifted than a typical human being. The same kind of thinking is applied, by some, to Ainan – because they personally know of no child like him.

The fact that people can doubt the existence of the more gifted members of society and history does suggest that gifted people have much work to do in creating awareness of their nature and capabilities. This skepticism as to the reality of gifted people is a problem – for those who doubt the existence and capacities of such people, can lead to frustrations for the gifted people, in gaining access to the resources they need to do what they can do, given the chance. Quite simply: if gatekeepers don’t believe in the existence of such children, why on Earth would they open the doors to them? The parents of such children can end up being ignored or dismissed, without any proper checking having been done, as to the truth of their statements, being done.

This is a very big problem in some countries as far as I can observe. In Japan, for instance, there is a phrase used to describe parents who think highly of their children and who describe them in terms reserved for the gifted. I have actually seen this phrase used to describe the parents of a prodigy, who had been met with doubt by the Japanese. Guess what this phrase translates as? Well, it essentially says: “Stupid parents”. There appears to be a resistance there, to believing that such children can be. They prefer to think that there is something wrong with the parents. It is not hard to imagine the difficulties the parents of a prodigious child would encounter when faced with such attitudes.

There is a remedy to this reflexive disbelief that some people have when they hear tales of people whose gifts surpass those they are personally acquainted with: public discussion. The more people speak of such people, the more familiar people become with their capacities, the more comfortable people will become with them. The appearance of such people in the media, will gradually educate the masses as to their existence, and abilities. In time, they will come to be accepted – as happened to Ainan in Singapore. The doubters on forums, vanished after a few appearances in the media. Yet, I must say, it took a couple of years to reach that point: there was a lot of paranoia on the way, on the part of some forum commenters.

In a way, therefore, the fact that some people doubt the existence of Leonardo da Vinci, and Ainan Cawley (and no doubt, others too, of a similar ilk), is a failure of communication. The more gifted have not done a good enough job of communicating to the wider public. In that sense, this blog is serving a useful purpose, in that the more I write, the more people become acquainted with what I have observed of Ainan. This is a help to all prodigious children, everywhere, in that they are less likely to encounter the sheer disbelief that they could ever be. Oh. That reminds me. More than once I have received searches for the terms: “Are child prodigies real?” and “Are child prodigies just a myth?”. It is clear that there are people out there, who not only disbelieve in the existence of particular prodigies or geniuses, but who disbelieve in the entire concept of child prodigies. For them, no such children could ever be.

Better understanding of prodigies, can only make their lives easier and make their access to educational and other opportunities less problematic. Thus, I shall continue to write what I see and understand, in the hope that it leads others to understand, too.

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175

To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here: http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks. You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at: http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is at http://www.genghiscan.com/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

Seeing the unseen.

A few weeks ago, Ainan proffered a car magazine to me.

“What do you notice about this photograph?”, he enquired, intently, his eyes filled with hidden meanings.

He was pointing at the cover.

One of the cars I recognized, immediately.

“A Bugatti Veyron is overtaking another car…”

“Is it?” he asked, his gaze directing me to look more closely.

“Yes.”, for assuredly, the Bugatti was in front of the other car. Though, of course, I had no way of knowing what would happen shortly afterwards, or what their relative velocity was – however, the photo seemed to mean what I thought it to mean.

“Dad,” began Ainan, in the tone of one about to explain something to someone who clearly did not understand, “These two cars were never in the same place.”

They sure looked pretty close to me.

“This image has been faked, Dad.”

I attended to the photo more closely – and waited for Ainan to continue.

“If you look at the Bugatti, the shadows fall here,” he pointed, “and the highlights on the paintwork, are here,” he pointed again. “This suggests that the lighting comes from over here.” His finger was suspended in space above the photograph. “However,” he continued, “if you look at the other car, the shadows are here and the lighting appears to come from here.” His finger hovered in a rather different place to the first intuited Sun. “These two cars have been taken from different images and a composite made.”

“Ah.”, I said, eloquently. “I see.”

He was right. This image was not a natural one and these cars never passed each other in the way depicted.

It should be noted, here, that the shadows and highlights Ainan pointed out, were subtle matters and not at all obvious. The shadows were quite small and very few people would have noticed what he saw so clearly. I didn’t, for one and I am generally thought of as alert.

What was on show, in this instance, was one of Ainan’s particular gifts: seeing things as they actually are, and not as he is meant to see them. Ainan is a very observant boy. The little things which no-one would ever notice, in a lifetime, are just the things he points out, and discusses, sometimes at length and detail. It seems that he is particularly difficult to fool where visual matters are concerned. Of course, this is the primary way most people observe the world, so it is a most useful attribute. Often, the only thing that might separate two scientists one “brilliant” and the other ordinary, is how effective they are at observing. History is filled with scientific advances that have, at their core, a careful observer and a subtle observation. It would be difficult to overestimate its importance as a quality – both for the scientist and, I might add, any artist, too.

This is but one occasion on which Ainan has pointed out something less than obvious about his environment – something which everyone else had overlooked. However, it gives a sense of his peculiar attentiveness. I would be most unsurprised if this characteristic leads him to produce something interesting, or unexpected, in the course of his life – something which everyone else had simply missed.

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page. To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 4, this month, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here: http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at: http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is at http://www.genghiscan.com/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)