Category Archives: Science and technology
New research on ADHD
My son Peter, who is ADHD and autistic, pointed me to several articles reporting research, conducted at The University of Nottingham in Great Britain, on children with attention deficit / hyperactivity disorder that suggests what goes wrong, There’s a part … Continue reading
Nisbett, Jensen and Rushton
Hunter High School is an extremely selective exam school in New York City, recently the subject of some attention because a student speaker at graduation, upset about the racial/ethnic mix of students there, said: “If you truly believe that the … Continue reading
Galloping human evolution II
Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending have a new book out, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. It expands on a paper they and others published last year, which I wrote about then. The book’s website has a … Continue reading
Fun with Click and Jane
Virginia Heffernan writes a media column for The New York Times, and last week’s, titled “Click and Jane,” asks “What are kids learning to read when they learn to read online?” The question was prompted, she tells us, by her … Continue reading
Goldin, Katz and fans
(Cross-posted at Kitchen Table Math, the Sequel) Goldin and Katz make two largely correct diagnostic points in The Race Between Education and Technology; that the United States got a significant head start on economic development because it expanded access to … Continue reading
Guesstimates
Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution points to a new book by Lawrence Weinstein and John Adam, Guesstimation: Solving the World’s Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin. Cowen asks a sample question: How many people are airborne over … Continue reading
All together now
In his book The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford draws an amusing contrast between himself and biologist E.O. Wilson to illustrate the principle of comparative advantage — Wilson may be the better economist, Harford says, but given all the various things … Continue reading
Galloping human evolution
Time was, teachers used to tell their students that accelerating cultural evolution – the alphabet, the wheel, movable type, the steam engine, the computer, whatever – meant human biological evolution wasn’t important any more. It was too slow. A blockbuster … Continue reading
More on James Watson
Jason Malloy at the population genetics blog Gene Expression reviews the deliberately dishonest attacks on James Watson for saying that people in sub-Saharan Africa perform worse on IQ tests than Europeans and (especially) East Asians, and provides links to dozens … Continue reading
The disinvitations continue
Dr. James Watson, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on the structure of DNA, has fallen into a thermal pool with his comments, made in an interview with the Sunday Times of London, that he … Continue reading