I am fortunate to have never been near a tornado. The deadly ones that hit Oklahoma yesterday were massive. There is a breed of people called tornado chasers who actually seek them out to follow and photograph, some for scientific purposes, others just for the thrill of it. [Read more…]
Nearly three decades ago, work by James R. Flynn revealed that average IQ scores in developed countries were rising at a stunning pace, of the order of 0.3 points per year or more. Later work showed similar explosive gains in developing countries and that the rise (now dubbed ‘the Flynn effect’) is still continuing. How did he find this? Recall that although IQ tests themselves have changed over time, each revision requires the IQ scores to be normed to always have an average value of 100. So does someone who scores 100 today have the same IQ of someone who scored 100 say fifty years ago, since they took different tests? Flynn found that if you give people today old IQ tests, their scores rose steadily the older the tests, suggesting that IQ tests have got harder over time. (James R. Flynn, Are We Getting Smarter?, 2012) [Read more…]
The Jason Richwine dissertation, like its predecessor The Bell Curve in 1994, argued that IQ scores are a good proxy for intelligence, that intelligence has a substantial hereditary component and is thus largely immutable to change by external measures, and that high IQ levels are significant predictors of economic and social success in life while low levels predict a life of crime, unemployment, and general failure. According to Richwine, American Hispanics have average IQs around 89 (the overall average is fixed to be 100) and thus Hispanic immigrants will be a drain on society. (See here and here for earlier posts on this.) [Read more…]
I have heard about retroviruses and that HIV belonged to that family but not being a biologist knew nothing more about what a retrovirus was and how it differed from any other virus. This article by Carl Zimmer explains what they are and in addition says that new research about them has revealed that we all have a lot of retroviruses that invaded our DNA a long time ago and that over time have mutated to become either inactive or dormant. [Read more…]
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with partisanship. We often have to decide one way or the other on some issue and in the absence of any significant information that dictates how to choose, it is not unreasonable for people to align themselves with ‘their’ side, with those with whom they feel generally close to on most issues. [Read more…]
Two years ago, I wrote about research that found that those people who tried to multitask (i.e., switch rapidly between different cognitive tasks) were highly inefficient in procession information when compared to those who did the same work sequentially. They suffered in all three major areas that would be necessary to multitask: the ability to filter (i.e., to detect irrelevancy so as to be able to quickly distinguish between those things that are important and those that are not), the rapidity with which they could switch from one task to the next, and the ability to sort and organize the information in the brain so as to keep track of the results of their different tasks. [Read more…]
All measurements of a continuously varying quantity (length, weight, mass, etc.) have some level of uncertainty (more commonly referred to as the ‘error’) associated with them, due to the limits of the measuring instrument or limitations of the measurer. In order to mitigate the effects of this, nowadays we take many measurements and calculate the average value of the quantity. [Read more…]
For those of you in the Cleveland area who are doing nothing important this evening, I will be giving a talk at 7:00 pm today May 8, 2013 to the Northeast Ohio Center for Inquiry on the topic The ‘God’ Particle:The reality behind the hype over the search for the Higgs boson.
It will be at the Mayfield Library, 500 S.O.M. Center Rd., Mayfield Village.
Evolution by natural selection says that those characteristics that enable organisms to survive and reproduce more than others will tend to end up dominating the population. In that model, organisms seek to propagate their genes as much as possible. Suicide as a biological instinct is clearly not advantageous and should be selected against and disappear over time. So what are we to make of some mice that seem to commit suicide by actually running towards cats and being killed and eaten by them? [Read more…]
It seems laughable now but we should recall that when the Large Hadron Collider was being constructed, there were fears that the high-energy collisions it would enable would destroy the world by creating black holes or some such thing. Even I got questions about this possibility from people who are not normally paranoid. [Read more…]