My Secret Stash

Abolish the SAT by Charles Murray

2007-08-30T10:31:00.000-07:00

The SAT got him into Harvard from a small Iowa town. But now, CHARLES MURRAY wants to abolish the test. It’s unnecessary and, worse, a negative force in American life.

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For most high school students who want to attend an elite college, the SAT is more than a test. It is one of life’s landmarks. Waiting for the scores—one for verbal, one for math, and now one for writing, with a possible 800 on each—is painfully suspenseful. The exact scores are commonly remembered forever after.

So it has been for half a century. But events of recent years have challenged the SAT’s position. In 2001, Richard Atkinson, president of the University of California, proposed dropping the SAT as a requirement for admission. More and more prestigious small colleges, such as Middlebury and Bennington, are making the SAT optional. The charge that the SAT is slanted in favor of privileged children—“a wealth test,” as Harvard law professor Lani Guinier calls it—has been ubiquitous. I have watched the attacks on the SAT with dismay. Back in 1961, the test helped get me into Harvard from a small Iowa town by giving me a way to show that I could compete with applicants from Exeter and Andover. Ever since, I have seen the SAT as the friend of the little guy, just as James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard, said it would be when he urged the SAT upon the nation in the 1940s.

I considered the SAT to be the friend of the little guy, just as James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard, said it would when he urged the SAT upon the nation in the 1940s.

Conant’s cause was as unambiguously liberal in the 1940s as income redistribution is today. Then, America’s elite colleges drew most of their students from a small set of elite secondary schools, concentrated in the northeastern United States, to which America’s wealthy sent their children. The mission of the SAT was to identify intellectual talent regardless of race, color, creed, money, or geography, and give that talent a chance to blossom. Students from small towns and from poor neighborhoods in big cities were supposed to benefit—as I thought I did, and as many readers of the american think they did.

But data trump gratitude. The evidence has become overwhelming that the SAT no longer serves a democratizing purpose. Worse, events have conspired to make the SAT a negative force in American life. And so I find myself arguing that the SAT should be ended. Not just deemphasized, but no longer administered. Nothing important would be lost by so doing. Much would be gained.

To clarify my terms: Here, “SAT” will always refer to the verbal and mathematics tests that you have in mind when you recall your own SAT scores. They, along with the writing test added in 2005, are now officially known as “reasoning tests” or SAT I (labels I will ignore). The College Board also administers one-hour achievement tests in English literature, United States history, world history, biology, chemistry, physics, two levels of math, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, and Spanish. These are now called “subject tests” or SAT II (more labels I will ignore).

I do not discuss the College Board’s advanced placement (AP) tests that can enable students to get college credit, because they cannot serve as a substitute for either the SAT or the achievement tests. Not all schools offer AP courses, and the AP’s five-point scoring system conveys limited information.

Start with the proposition that nothing important would be lost by dropping the SAT. The surprising empirical reality is that the SAT is redundant if students are required to take achievement tests.

In theory, the SAT and the achievement tests measure different things. In the College Board’s own words from its website, “The SAT measures students’ verbal reasoning, critical reading, and skills,” while the achievement tests “show colleges their mastery of specific subjects.” In practice, SAT and achievement test scores are so highly correlated that SAT scores tell the admissions office little that it does not learn from the achievement test scores alone.

The coaching industry touts the clever test-taking strategies it teaches, but the bulk of the contribution comes from garden-variety preparation that is easily open to any student at no cost.

The pivotal analysis was published in 2001 by the University of California (UC), which requires all applicants to take both the SAT and achievement tests (three of them at the time the data were gathered: reading, mathematics, and a third of the student’s choosing). Using a database of 77,893 students who applied to UC from 1996 to 1999, Saul Geiser and Roger Studley analyzed the relationship among high school grades, SAT scores, achievement test scores, and freshman grades in college. Here is what they found:

Achievement tests did slightly better than the SAT in predicting freshman grades. High school grade point average, SAT scores, and achievement test scores were entered into a statistical equation to predict the grade point that applicants achieved during their freshman year in college. The researchers found that achievement tests and high school grade point each had about the same independent role—that is, each factor was, by itself, an equally accurate predictor of how a student will do as a college freshman.

But the SAT’s independent role in predicting freshman grade point turned out to be so small that knowing the SAT score added next to nothing to an admissions officer’s ability to forecast how an applicant will do in college—the reason to give the test in the first place. In technical terms, adding the SAT to the other two elements added just one-tenth of a percentage point to the percentage of variance in freshman grades explained by high school grade point and the achievement tests.

But what about the students we’re most concerned about—those with high ability who have attended poor schools? The California Department of Education rates the state’s high schools based on the results from its standardized testing program for grades K–12. For schools in the bottom quintile of the ratings—hard as I found it to believe—the achievement tests did slightly better than the SAT in predicting how the test-takers would perform as college freshmen.

What about students from families with low incomes? Children of parents with poor education? Here’s another stunner: after controlling for parental income and education, the independent role of the SAT in predicting freshman grade point disappeared altogether. The effectiveness of high school grade point and of achievement tests to predict freshman grade point was undiminished.

Combine these edges, the critics say, and it comes down to this: if you're rich, you can buy your kids a high SAT score.

All freshman grades are not created equal, so the UC study took the obvious differences into account. It broke down its results by college campus (an A at Berkeley might not mean the same thing as an A at Santa Cruz) and by freshman major (an A in a humanities course might not mean the same thing as an A in a physical science course). The results were unaffected. Again, the SAT was unnecessary; it added nothing to the forecasts provided by high school grades and achievement tests.

Thorough as the Geiser and Studley presentation was, almost any social science conclusion can be challenged through different data or a different set of analyses. The College Board, which makes many millions of dollars every year from the SAT, had every incentive and ample resources to refute the UC results. But it could not.

In 2002, the College Board published its analysis, “The Utility of the SAT I and SAT II for Admissions Decisions in California and the Nation.” The College Board’s study disentangled some statistical issues that the UC study had not and used a different metric to express predictive validity, but its bottom line was effectively identical. Once high school grade point and achievement test scores are known, the incremental value of knowing the SAT score is trivially small.

Still reluctant to give up on the SAT, I wondered whether the College Board had been unwilling to make the best defense. Perhaps the SAT had made an important independent contribution to predicting college performance in earlier years, but by the time research was conducted in the last half of the 1990s, the test had already been ruined by political correctness. To see where this hypothesis comes from, a little history is required.

Originally, the point of the SAT—whose initials, after all, stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test—was to measure aptitude, defined by the dictionary as “inherent ability,” rather than to measure academic achievement. But in the aftermath of the 1960s, the concept of aptitude became troublesome. The temper of the times meant that long-observed ethnic and class differences in mental test scores had to be interpreted as the fault of the tests that produced them. Like all other mental tests, the SAT persistently showed such differences; therefore, the SAT had to be a bad test, culturally biased in favor of upper-middle-class white kids.

The psychometricians at the College Board could provide ample data to refute the cultural bias charge (see the sidebar below), but the College Board was run by people who were eager to demonstrate their own progressive credentials. They ran from the concept of aptitude as the Florentines fled the plague. In the 1980s, the College Board tried to make a semantic case for a difference between scholastic aptitude and intelligence. This was unsuccessful for the good reason that, operationally, there isn’t any difference. In 1993, the College Board abandoned aptitude altogether and changed the name of the SAT to “Scholastic Assessment Test.” In 1994, it introduced major substantive changes to the SAT that were explicitly intended to link the test more closely to the curriculum.

Did the pre-1994 SAT measure something importantly different from what the post-1994 SAT had measured? Don’t bother asking the College Board. The data for answering that question would require the College Board to reveal just how well the original and revised SATs measure the general mental factor g, the stuff of intelligence/aptitude, and the College Board does not want to acknowledge that the SAT measures g at all or, for that matter, that g even exists.

Seen from an outsider’s perspective, the changes in 1993–1994 do not look particularly important. Twenty-five antonym items in the SAT Verbal were replaced with reading-comprehension items, on grounds that the antonym items could be compromised by students who memorized vocabulary lists. The math test saw some changes in the answer format. But samples of the new items appear to be plausible measures of g and not obviously inferior to the items they replaced.

Despite the College Board’s rhetoric about revamping the SAT to reflect curriculum, the changes in the test in 1993–1994 probably did not have much effect on the SAT’s power to measure g—in the jargon, its g-loading. (I would not make the same statement about today’s SAT, which has eliminated the highly g-loaded analogy items and added a writing component that carries with it a multitude of scoring problems.)

The College Board was run by people who were eager to demonstrate their own progressive credentials. They ran from the concept of aptitude as the Florentines fled the plague.

If I am wrong, and the pre-1994 SAT measured g much better than the SAT used for the UC study, then I hope some disaffected College Board psychometrician leaks that news immediately. I will thereupon join a crusade to restore the old SAT. But given the available information, I think it is probable that even analyses conducted prior to the revisions in the test would not have shown a major independent role for the SAT after taking high school transcript and achievement test scores into account. To put it another way, those of us who thought that the SAT was our salvation were probably wrong. Even coming from mediocre high schools, our scores on achievement tests would have conveyed about the same picture to college admissions committees as our scores on the SAT conveyed.

I know how counterintuitive this sounds (I am presenting a conclusion I resisted as long as I could). But the truth about any achievement test, from an AP exam down to a weekly pop quiz, is that the smartest kids tend to get the highest scores. All mental tests are g-loaded to some degree. What was not realized until the UC study was just how high that correlation was for the SAT and the achievement tests.

Before, studies of the relationship had been based on self-selected samples of students who chose to take achievement tests along with the SAT, and there was good reason to think those students were unrepresentative. But by requiring all applicants to take both the SAT and achievement tests, the University of California got rid of this problem—and the correlations were still very high.

After the College Board did all of its statistical corrections in its 2002 study and applied them to test-takers from California, it found, for example, that the correlation between the SAT Verbal and the Literature Achievement test was a very high 0.83 (a correlation of 1.0 represents a perfect direct relationship). The correlation between the SAT Math and the Math IC achievement test was 0.86. So I conclude that bright students who do not go to first-rate high schools will do fine without the SAT. Consider these scenarios:

Start with motivated, high-ability students who go to truly bad schools, meaning the worst schools in the inner cities. The bright students’ achievement test scores are likely to be depressed by the schools’ dreadfulness, but even scores that are just fair will get the attention of an admissions office if the transcript shows As and the recommendations are enthusiastic. The nation’s top colleges desperately want to increase their enrollment of inner-city blacks and Hispanics, and are willing to make large allowances for bad schooling to do so.

Next, turn to the much larger number of high-ability students who are in schools that are not awful, but mediocre—the typical urban or small-town public school. The curriculum includes all the standard college-prep courses with standard textbooks. A few of the teachers are terrific, but most are no more than ordinary.

The SAT test isn't the problem. The children of the well educated and affluent get most of the top scores because they constitute most of the smartest kids. They are smart not because their parents are well educated, but because their parents are smart.

The high-ability students in such schools who are playing the game, studying hard, have no problem at all if the SAT is eliminated. They have nearly straight As on their transcripts, which most college admissions offices treat as the most important single source of information. Their letters of recommendation are afire with zeal on their behalf. These students also do well on the achievement tests. A hard-working, high-ability physics student is likely to absorb enough physics from the textbook to do well on the physics achievement test despite a so-so teacher. In addition, high-ability kids who play the game have usually been reading voraciously—and in the process picked up a great deal of knowledge about history, literature, and culture on their own. This information has been gathered inefficiently, but high-ability students absorb knowledge like a sponge, no matter what schools they attend.

Now consider high-ability students in mediocre schools who do not play the classroom game. They are bored with their classes and sometimes get Bs and the occasional C, but they have active minds and are looking for ways to occupy themselves. They spend all their time on the debate team or writing for the high school newspaper, or in the drama department. By the end of high school, they have a long list of accomplishments studding their applications. One way or the other, by the end of high school, students in this category are very likely to have done things that will catch the attention of an admissions officer. And again, their achievement test scores are high. These students are at least as intellectually curious as those who play the game. Their Bs do not mean they didn’t absorb the substance of the coursework, and they too have typically encountered and retained large amounts of information outside school.

That leaves the worst case: high-ability students who are alienated by school and perhaps by life. They don’t study, don’t go out for the debate team, don’t read on their own, don’t even watch the Discovery Channel. It is possible for them nonetheless to achieve a high score on an individually administered IQ test, despite being hostile and uninterested. Arthur Jensen relates the time he was testing a sullen subject in a juvenile detention facility and came to the vocabulary item “apocryphal.” The boy answered, “How the hell should I know? I think the whole Bible is [bunk].” In an individually administered IQ test, the examiner could score his answer as correct, but that same alienated boy is unlikely to get a high score on the SAT because no one, no matter how smart, gets a high score on the SAT without concentrating and trying hard over the course of three stressful hours. So keeping the SAT will not help most students in this category. They won’t try hard, and their SAT scores will be mediocre despite their ability.

That leaves an extremely odd set of high-ability students who will be harmed by dropping the SAT—so alienated that they do nothing to express their ability in school, so completely walled off from independent learning that they do poorly on the achievement tests, and yet able to buckle down on the SAT and get a good score. I am not sure that getting a good score under such circumstances is even possible on the SAT Math—too many of the questions presuppose hard work in algebra class—but perhaps it could be done on the SAT Verbal.

In any case, we are now talking about a very few students, and even for them it is not clear whether dropping the SAT introduces an injustice. Should such a student be given a slot that could have been filled by a less-talented student who is eager to give a competitive college his best effort? Being forced to go to an unselective college instead could well be the better outcome for all concerned.

There is good reason to think that a world in which achievement tests have replaced the SAT is not going to be a world in which motivated high-ability students from bad or mediocre schools have less opportunity to get into the college where they belong. It may be a marginally worse world for a small number of unmotivated high-ability students who want to attend selective colleges, but that outcome is not necessarily undesirable.

But why get rid of the SAT? If it works just about as well as the achievement tests in predicting college success, what’s the harm in keeping it?

The short answer is that the image of the SAT has done a 180-degree turn. No longer seen as a compensating resource for the unprivileged, it has become a corrosive symbol of privilege. “Back when kids just got a good night’s sleep and took the SAT, it was a leveler that helped you find the diamond in the rough,” Lawrence University’s dean of admissions told The New York Times recently. “Now that most of the great scores are affluent kids with lots of preparation, it just increases the gap between the haves and the have-nots.”

As those who get the high SAT scores are increasingly from socially and economically privileged families, a sense of entitlement among the privileged is becoming unmistakable. It would be better is no one had those numbers in their head.

If you’re rich, the critics say, you can raise your children in an environment where they will naturally acquire the information the SAT tests. If you’re rich, you can enroll your children in Kaplan, or Princeton Review, or even get private tutors to coach your kids in the tricks of test-taking, and thereby increase their SAT scores by a couple of hundred points. If you’re rich, you can shop around for a diagnostician who will classify your child as learning-disabled and therefore eligible to take the SAT without time limits. Combine these edges, and it comes down to this: if you’re rich, you can buy your kids a high SAT score.

Almost every parent with whom I discuss the SAT believes these charges. In fact, the claims range from simply false, in the case of cultural bias, to not-nearly-as-true-as-you-think, in the case of the others. Take coaching as an example, since it seems to be so universally accepted by parents and has been studied so extensively.

From 1981 to 1990, three separate analyses of all the prior studies were published in peer-reviewed journals. They found a coaching effect of 9 to 25 points on the SAT Verbal and of 15 to 25 points on the SAT Math. In 2004, Derek Briggs, using the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, found effects of 3 to 20 points for the SAT Verbal and 10 to 28 points for the SAT Math. Donald Powers and Donald Rock, using a nationally representative sample of students who took the SAT after its revisions in the mid-1990s, found an average coaching effect of 6 to 12 points on the SAT Verbal and 13 to 18 points on the SAT Math. Many studies tell nearly identical stories. On average, coaching raises scores by no more than a few dozen points, enough to sway college admissions in exceedingly few cases.

I am not reporting a scholarly literature with a two-sided debate. No study published in a peer-reviewed journal shows average gains approaching the fabled 100-point and 200-point jumps you hear about in anecdotes. While preparing this article, I asked Kaplan and Princeton Review for such evidence. Kaplan replied that it chooses not to release data for proprietary reasons. Princeton Review did not respond at all.

But the coaching business is booming, with affluent parents being the best customers. If the payoff is really so small, why has the market judged coaching to be so successful?

Most obviously, parents who pay for expensive coaching courses ignore the role of self-selection: the students who seem to profit from a coaching course tend to be those who, if the course had not been available, would have worked hard on their own to prepare for the test.

Then parents confuse the effects of coaching with the effect of the basic preparation that students can do on their own. No student should walk into the SAT cold. It makes sense for students to practice some sample items, easily available from school guidance offices and online, and to review their algebra textbook if it has been a few years since they have taken algebra. But once a few hours have been spent on these routine steps, most of the juice has been squeezed out of preparation for the SAT. Combine self-selection artifacts with the role of basic preparation, and you have the reason that independent studies using control groups show such small average gains from formal coaching.

A hard-working, high-ability physics student is likely to absorb enough physics from the textbook to do well on the physics achievement test--despite the shortcomings of the teacher.

It makes no difference, however, that the charges about coaching are wrong, just as it makes no difference that the whole idea that rich parents can buy their children high SAT scores is wrong. One part of the indictment is true, and that one part overrides everything else: the children of the affluent and well educated really do get most of the top scores. For example, who gets the coveted scores of 700 and higher, putting them in the top half-dozen percentiles of SAT test-takers? Extrapolating from the 2006 data on means and standard deviations reported by the College Board, about half of the 700+ scores went to students from families making more than $100,000 per year. But the truly consequential statistics are these: Approximately 90 percent of the students with 700+ scores had at least one parent with a college degree. Over half had a parent with a graduate degree.

In that glaring relationship of high test scores to advanced parental education, which in turn means high parental IQ, lies the reason that the College Board, politically correct even unto self-destruction, cannot bring itself to declare the truth: the test isn’t the problem. The children of the well educated and affluent get most of the top scores because they constitute most of the smartest kids. They are smart because their parents are smart. The parents have passed their smartness along through parenting practices that are largely independent of education and affluence, and through genes that are completely independent of them.

The cognitive stratification of American society—for that’s what we’re talking about—was not a problem 100 years ago. Many affluent people were smart in 1907, but there were not enough jobs in which high intellectual ability brought high incomes or status to affect more than a fraction of really smart people, and most of the really smart people were prevented from getting those jobs anyway by economic and social circumstances (consider that in 1907 roughly half the adults with high intelligence were housewives).

From 1907 to 2007, the correlation between intellectual ability and socioeconomic status (SES) increased dramatically. The socioeconomic elite and the cognitive elite are increasingly one. If you want the details about how this process worked and how it is transforming America’s class structure, I refer you to The Bell Curve (1994), the book I wrote with the late Richard Herrnstein. For now, here’s the point: Imagine that, miraculously, every child in the country were to receive education of equal quality. Imagine that a completely fair and accurate measure of intellectual ability were to be developed. In that utopia, a fair admissions process based on intellectual ability would fill the incoming classes of the elite colleges predominantly with children of upper-middle-class parents.

A world in which achievement tests have replaced the SAT is not going to be a world in which motivated high-ability students from bad or mediocre schools have less opportunity to get into the college where they belong.

In other words, such a perfect system would produce an outcome very much like the one we see now. Harvard offers an easy way to summarize the revolution that accelerated after World War II. As late as 1952, the mean SAT Verbal score of the incoming freshman class was just 583. By 1960, the mean had jumped to 678. In eight years, Harvard transformed itself from a college with a moderately talented student body to a place where the average freshman was intellectually in the top fraction of 1 percent of the national population. But this change did not mean that Harvard became more socioeconomically diverse. On the contrary, it became more homogeneous. In the old days, Harvard had admitted a substantial number of Boston students from modest backgrounds who commuted to classes, and also a substantial number of rich students with average intelligence. In the new era, when Harvard’s students were much more rigorously screened for intellectual ability, the numbers of students from the very top and bottom of the socioeconomic ladder were reduced, and the proportion coming from upper-middle-class backgrounds increased.

The other high-ranking schools have similar stories to tell. In a sample of 11 of the most prestigious colleges studied by William Bowen and his colleagues between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, the proportion of students in the top SES quartile rose from about a third to a half of all students, while the share in the bottom quartile remained constant at one-tenth. And these were schools such as Princeton and Yale that get first chance to admit the scarce and sought-after candidates of high ability from poor backgrounds.

When, in 2003, Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose expanded the definition of top-tier colleges to include 146 schools, fully 74 percent of the students came from families in the top SES quartile, while only 3 percent came from the bottom quartile. Ethnic diversity has increased during the last half century, but not socioeconomic diversity.

Because upper-middle-class families produce most of the smartest kids, there is no way to reform the system (short of disregarding intellectual ability altogether) to prevent their children from coming out on top. We can only make sure that high-ability students from disadvantaged backgrounds realize that the nation’s best colleges yearn for their applications and that their chance of breaking out of their disadvantaged situations has never been better—in short, that the system is not rigged. Now, the widespread belief is that the system is rigged, and the SAT is a major reason for that belief. The most immediate effect of getting rid of the SAT is to remove an extremely large and bright red herring. But there are more good effects.

Getting rid of the SAT will destroy the coaching industry as we know it. Coaching for the SAT is seen as the teaching of tricks and strategies—a species of cheating—not as supplementary education. The retooled coaching industry will focus on the achievement tests, but insofar as the offerings consist of cram courses for tests in topics such as U.S. history or chemistry, its taint will be reduced.

A low-income student shut out of opportunity for an SAT coaching school has the sense of being shut out of mysteries. Being shut out of a cram course is less daunting. Students know that they can study for a history or chemistry exam on their own. A coaching industry that teaches content along with test-taking techniques will have the additional advantage of being much better pedagogically—at least the students who take the coaching courses will be spending some of their time learning history or chemistry.

The substitution of achievement tests for the SAT will put a spotlight on the quality of the local high school’s curriculum. If achievement test scores are getting all of the parents’ attention in the college admissions process, the courses that prepare for those achievement tests will get more of their attention as well, and the pressure for those courses to improve will increase.

The final benefit of getting rid of the SAT is the hardest to describe but is probably the most important. By getting rid of the SAT, we would be getting rid of a totem for members of the cognitive elite.

People forget achievement test scores. They do not forget cognitive test scores. The only cognitive test score that millions of people know about themselves is the SAT score. If the score is high, it is seen as proof that one is smart. If the score is not high, it is evidence of intellectual mediocrity or worse. Furthermore, it is evidence that cannot be explained away as a bad grade can be explained away. All who enter an SAT testing hall feel judged by their scores.

A few high-profile colleges could have a domino effect. Suppose, for example, that this fall Harvard and Stanford were jointly to announce that SAT scores will no longer be accepted.

Worse yet, there are few other kinds of scores to counterbalance the SAT. Of the many talents and virtues that people possess, we have good measures for quantifying few besides athletic and intellectual ability. Falling short in athletic ability can be painful, especially for boys, but the domain of sports is confined. Intellectual ability has no such limits, and the implications of the SAT score spill far too widely. The 17-year-old who is at the 40th percentile on the SAT has no other score that lets him say to himself, “Yes, but I’m at the 99th percentile in working with my hands,” or “Yes, but I’m at the 99th percentile for courage in the face of adversity.

Conversely, it seems to make no difference that high intellectual ability is a gift for which its recipients should be humbly grateful. Far too many students see a high score on the SAT as an expression of their own merit, not an achievement underwritten by the dumb luck of birth.

Hence the final reason for getting rid of the SAT: knowing those scores is too dispiriting for those who do poorly and too inspiriting for those who do well. In an age when intellectual talent is increasingly concentrated among young people who are also privileged economically and socially, the last thing we need are numbers that give these very, very lucky kids a sense of entitlement.

How are we to get rid of the SAT when it is such an established American institution and will be ferociously defended by the College Board and a large test-preparation industry?

Actually, it could happen quite easily. Admissions officers at elite schools are already familiar with the statistical story I have presented. They know that dropping the SAT would not hinder their selection decisions. Many of them continue to accept the SAT out of inertia—as long as the student has taken the test anyway, it costs nothing to add the scores to the student’s folder.

In that context, the arguments for not accepting the SAT can easily find a receptive audience, especially since the SAT is already under such severe criticism for the wrong reasons. Nor is it necessary to convince everyone to take action at the same time. A few high-profile colleges could have a domino effect. Suppose, for example, that this fall Harvard and Stanford were jointly to announce that SAT scores will no longer be accepted. Instead, all applicants to Harvard and Stanford will be required to take four of the College Board’s achievement tests, including a math test and excluding any test for a language used at home. If just those two schools took such a step, many other schools would follow suit immediately, and the rest within a few years.

It could happen, and it should happen. There is poignance in calling for an end to a test conceived for such a noble purpose. But the SAT score, intended as a signal flare for those on the bottom, has become a badge flaunted by those on top. We pay a steep educational and cultural price for a test that no one really needs.

Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

The SAT’s bias toward the privileged was first alleged in the 1960s and 1970s on grounds that SAT questions used vocabulary and situations that a poor black student from the inner city would never encounter. The critics asserted, and much of the public still believes, that the SAT is mainly a test of upper-middle-class socialization.

It is hard to exaggerate the scholarly detail with which cultural bias in the SAT (and other standardized tests) has been scrutinized. Arthur Jensen’s Bias in Mental Testing (1980) is still the classic discussion. One way to test for cultural bias is by asking whether the items in a test have the same order of difficulty for all groups. The SAT passes such scrutiny.

But the definitive test for cultural bias involves what is called “predictive validity.”

The purpose of the SAT is to predict college performance. If the SAT is biased against members of a group, then applicants from that group will do better than their scores predict if they are given the opportunity to show their real ability in a college classroom. The test underpredicts their college performance.

To determine whether a test is biased, just compare its predictive validity for different groups. This has been done for the SAT in multiple studies over the decades, and the results have shown that the SAT predicts college performance as well for poor test-takers as for rich test-takers, as well for ethnic minorities as for whites, and as well for women as for men. The caveat to this conclusion is a tendency for the SAT to overpredict, not underpredict, the college performance of African Americans. On average, it indicates they will do better than they actually do. —Charles Murray

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The F Word

2007-08-21T15:57:00.000-07:00

What Churchill said about Britain's immigrants

2007-08-18T13:18:00.000-07:00

Sir Winston Churchill expressed alarm about an influx of 'coloured people' in Fifties' Britain and looked for a chance to restore punishment by flogging, newly released cabinet papers from the national archive reveal.

On 3 February 1954, under the agenda item 'Coloured Workers', Churchill is quoted, with abbreviations, by Cabinet Secretary Sir Norman Brook as saying: 'Problems wh. will arise if many coloured people settle here. Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in UK? Attracted by Welfare State. Public opinion in UK won't tolerate it once it gets beyond certain limits.'

Florence Horsbrugh, the then Minister of Education and Conservative MP for Manchester Moss Side, is recorded as adding: 'Already becoming serious in Manchr.'

Then David Maxwell-Fyfe, the Home Secretary, gave a figure of 40,000 compared to 7,000 before the Second World War and raised the possibility of immigration control. He said: 'There is a case on merits for excludg. riff-raff. But politically it wd. be represented & discussed on basis of colour limitation. That wd. offend the floating vote viz., the old Liberals. We shd. be reversing age-long trad[ition] tht. B[ritish] S[ubjects] have right of entry to mother-country of Empire. We shd. offend Liberals, also sentimentalists.'

He added: 'The col[onial]. pop[ulations] are resented in L[iverpool], Paddington & other areas by those who come into contact with them. But those who don't are apt to take a more Liberal view.'

Churchill intervened: 'Ques. is wtr it is politically wise to allow public feeling to develop a little more before takg. action.'

Adding that it would be 'fatal' to let the situation develop too far, the Prime Minister is recorded as concluding: 'Wd lke also to study possibility of "quota" - no. not to be exceeded.'

The documents give an insight into attitudes of the time and echo modern concerns about border controls. Handwritten notebooks were kept as a record of cabinet meetings separate from the official minutes.

At another meeting, on 20 November 1952, the cabinet discussed corporal punishment, which had been abolished as a court sentence by the previous Attlee administration. Churchill is quoted saying: 'Shd we clutter ourselves up with enquiry when p.[ublic] opinion may give us chance to restore flogging for all crimes of violence & cruelty. Alternative is to devise much stiffer cond[itions] of imp[risonmen]t. What about a plebiscite on c.p. - a suitable subject. What of re-introducg. for 3 or 5 years, to see if it does reduce crime. If we can't act, I wd. sooner not have an enquiry.'

But Viscount Simonds, the Lord Chancellor, objected: 'Every civilised country, save Brazil & some States in US, has abandoned this penalty.'

On 10 July 1952, the cabinet turned its attention to 'Sugar: for Jam Making'. It was noted that there was strong pressure from farmers because a bumper crop would see plums go to waste and a call for the government to step in by issuing more sugar.

The difficulty was in deciding whether the extra sugar needed for the purpose of preserving the fruit should come out of government stockpiles or be found by reducing the sweet ration for three months to save enough sugar.

At the end of the cabinet debate, Churchill agreed that action must be taken and blamed on the bumper crop, declaring: 'Plums shall not rot.'

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Monthly stipend outrages Holocaust survivors

2007-08-17T11:51:00.000-07:00

Israeli government to offer $20 allowances, totaling $28 million annually

An Israeli government offer of a new $20 monthly stipend for Holocaust survivors provoked outrage Tuesday, with survivors charging the meager allowance will do nothing to make up for years of neglect of the 240,000 Israelis who lived through Nazi horrors.

Survivors have long claimed that European countries treat them far better than Israel, where many elderly survivors live in poverty. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's announcement of the new allowance did nothing to change that impression. One survivor called the offer "absurd and insulting."

Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II. Hundreds of thousands who survived concentration camps came to Israel after the war. Many suffered physical or psychological damage from the torture and deprivation they suffered at the hands of the Nazis.

Six decades after the war ended, the remaining survivors are elderly, and many have been unable to provide for themselves in their final years, suffering chronic shortages of money for medical and psychological treatment and in some cases even food.

Israel TV showed video of an 85-year-old survivor who said the only meat he could afford was chicken necks.

Olmert presented his program as a solution.

"We are correcting a 60-year-old blight," he said. "Holocaust survivors living in Israel are entitled to live respectably without reaching a situation in which it is beyond their means to enjoy a hot meal."

Beginning next year, the amount allocated for 120,000 needy survivors, about half the total number still living in Israel, will be $28 million annually, according to Olmert's statement.

But that works out to an average of just $20 a month for each survivor.

"Of course the survivors cannot accept such an offer," said Dubby Arbel, chairman of the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Survivors in Israel. Arbel said about 65,000 survivors are in acute need of assistance, but his foundation can provide for only half of them.

'Absurd and insulting'
Many survivors were outraged. "This doesn't solve anything," said survivor Avraham Roet, 79. "The government doesn't understand the significance of the Holocaust and what horrors the survivors went through. If they did, they wouldn't propose this absurd and insulting plan," he told The Associated Press.

The new payment is in addition to government support already given to survivors, including those deemed physically or psychologically handicapped, and regular pension payments of about $487 a month.

Survivors groups charged — in what was meant to be an especially painful dig at the Israeli government — that survivors are treated better in Germany.

"We know what the conditions of the Holocaust survivors are in Holland, France, Germany and Poland. They are much better than in Israel," Noah Frug, chairman of a consortium of Holocaust survivors' organizations and a survivor himself, told Israel Radio.

Hillary Kessler-Godin, spokeswoman for Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, said Germany still pays monthly pensions to 80,000 survivors around the world, after starting in the 1950s.

"Each survivor's pension can be different depending on their persecution history," she told the AP. Other funds have paid out billions of dollars to various categories of Nazi victims.

Roet said the average stipend for survivors in Holland, where he was born, is between $2,740 and $4,110 a month.

Too late, survivor says
Arbel urged Olmert to raise the allowance "for the sake of Jewish identity and Zionist identity, and so that we can all tell our grandchildren that we took care of the Holocaust survivors."

"For 42 years I received nothing from the state," survivor Kathleen Schwartz, 71, told the newspaper Haaretz. "This grant has arrived too late for thousands of survivors. Time is working against us."

Critics maintain that more of the nearly $80 billion in reparations Israel has received in compensation from Germany should have gone to the survivors. A large percentage of the money, which was paid beginning in the 1950s as Israelis struggled to build their fledgling state, went to the military and for infrastructure.

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Wikipedia 'shows CIA page edits'

2007-08-15T22:05:00.000-07:00

An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organisations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that the CIA was involved in editing entries.

Wikipedia Scanner allegedly shows that workers on the agency's computers made edits to the page of Iran's president.

It also purportedly shows that the Vatican has edited entries about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.

The tool, developed by US researchers, trawls a list of 5.3m edits and matches them to the net address of the editor.

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopaedia that can be created and edited by anyone.

Most of the edits detected by the scanner correct spelling mistakes or factual inaccuracies in profiles. However, others have been used to remove potentially damaging material or to deface sites.

Mistaken identity

On the profile of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the tool indicates that a worker on the CIA network reportedly added the exclamation "Wahhhhhh!" before a section on the leader's plans for his presidency.

A warning on the profile of the anonymous editor reads: "You have recently vandalised a Wikipedia article, and you are now being asked to stop this type of behaviour."

It is claimed the entry was changed by a CIA computer user

Other changes that have been made are more innocuous, and include tweaks to the profile of former CIA chief Porter Goss and celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey.

When asked whether it could confirm whether the changes had been made by a person using a CIA computer, an agency spokesperson responded: "I cannot confirm that the traffic you cite came from agency computers.

"I'd like in any case to underscore a far larger and more significant point that no one should doubt or forget: The CIA has a vital mission in protecting the United States, and the focus of this agency is there, on that decisive work."

Radio change

The site also indicates that a computer owned by the US Democratic Party was used to make changes to the site of right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

The changes brand Mr Limbaugh as "idiotic," a "racist", and a "bigot". An entry about his audience now reads: "Most of them are legally retarded."

We really value transparency and the scanner really takes this to another level

Wikipedia spokesperson

The IP address is registered in the name of the Democratic National Headquarters.

A spokesperson for the Democratic Party said that the changes had not been made on its computers. Instead, they said that the "IP address is the same as the DCCC".

The DCCC, or Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, is the "official campaign arm of the Democrats" in the House of Representatives and shares a building with the party.

"We don't condone these sorts of activities and we take every precaution to ensure that our network is used in a responsible manner," Doug Thornell of the DCCC told the BBC News website.

Mr Thornell pointed out that the edit had been made "close to two years ago" and it was "impossible to know" who had done it.

Voting issue

The site also indicates that Vatican computers were used to remove content from a page about the leader of the Irish republican party Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams.

Wikipedia already collects the IP address or username of editors

The edit removed links to newspaper stories written in 2006 that alleged that Mr Adams' fingerprints and handprints were found on a car used during a double murder in 1971.

The section, titled "Fresh murder question raised" is no longer available through the online encyclopaedia.

Wikipedia Scanner also points the finger at commercial organisations that have modified entries about the pages.

One in particular is Diebold, the company that supplied electronic voting machines for the controversial US election in 2000.

In October 2005, a person using a Diebold computer removed paragraphs about Walden O'Dell, chief executive of the company, which revealed that he had been "a top fund-raiser" for George Bush.

A month later, other paragraphs and links to stories about the alleged rigging of the 2000 election were also removed.

The paragraphs and links have since been reinstated.

Diebold officials have not responded to requests by the BBC for information about the changes.

Web history

The Wikipedia Scanner results are not the first time that people have been uncovered editing their own Wikipedia entries.

Wikipedia Scanner may prevent an organisation or individuals from editing articles that they're really not supposed to

Wikipedia spokesperson

Earlier this year, Microsoft was revealed to have offered money to experts to trawl through entries about the company and its products to make corrections.

Staff at the US Congress have also previously been exposed for editing and removing sensitive information about politicians.

An inquiry was launched after staff for Democratic representative Marty Meehan admitted polishing his biography

The new tool was built by Virgil Griffith of the California Institute of Technology.

It exploits the open nature of Wikipedia, which already collects the net address or username of editors and tracks all changes to a page. The information can be accessed in the "history" tab at the top of a Wikipedia page.

By merging this information with a database of IP address owners, Wikipedia Scanner is able to put a name to the organisation and firms from which edits are made.

The scanner cannot identify the individuals editing articles, admits Mr Griffith.

"Technically, we don't know whether it came from an agent of that company, however, we do know that edit came from someone with access to their network," he wrote on the Wikipedia Scanner site.

A spokesperson for Wikipedia said the tool helped prevent conflicts of interest.

"We really value transparency and the scanner really takes this to another level," they said.

"Wikipedia Scanner may prevent an organisation or individuals from editing articles that they're really not supposed to."

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Delinquents as Dummies

2007-08-14T17:43:00.000-07:00

How do kids become delinquents? One study suggests it all starts with low intelligence. For some time, researchers have known that delinquents score an average of eight points lower on IQ tests than their nondelinquent peers. Furthermore, a team of psychologists from the University of Wisconsin have demonstrated that low IQ begets delinquency rather than results from it. Moreover, they say the way that low IQ leads to juvenile delinquency differs between African-Americans and whites.

The team, headed by graduate student Donald Lynam, followed more than 600 fourth-graders judged to be at high risk for delinquency. For two to three years, researchers gathered data on race, socioeconomic status, behavioral impulsivity, and success in school. Kids took standard IQ tests at the beginning and end of the study.

The prospective study design demonstrated that, among kids who later became delinquents, low IQ scores are present well before they take up nefarious activities.

In addition, boys with impulsive natures are at greatest risk because they consistently fail to weigh the consequences of their impulsive actions.

But perhaps the most significant finding, reported in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology (Vol. 102, No. 2), is the extent to which school failure presages juvenile delinquency. Students with low IQs are less likely to succeed in school and therefore less likely to respect the school as a bastion of authority. So they don't buy into the value system teachers are trying to transmit.

For African-Americans, the link between school failure and delinquency is especially pronounced. "When we measured black boys and white boys who were both performing poorly in school," Lynam said, "it was only the black boys who were at risk for engaging in delinquency."

Schools, he explains, exert informal yet powerful social controls on their students. For African-Americans, who are disproportionately represented in poor communities, schools may provide the social control lacking in a neighborhood of overburdened single-parent households. But if a boy finds school so frustrating that he rejects it, its power is null, and the chances for engaging in delinquency increase rapidly. Neighborhood pressures are then free to rush in and fill the void.

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4,000 PEOPLE A WEEK TRYING TO LEAVE UK

2007-08-14T17:38:00.000-07:00

BRITAIN is facing a mass exodus of people looking to escape the crime and grime of modern living.

The country’s biggest foreign visa consultancy firm has revealed that applications have soared in the last seven months by 80 per cent to almost 4,000 a week. Ten years ago the figure was just 300 a week.

Most people are relocating within the Commonwealth – in Australia, Canada and South Africa. They are almost all young professionals and skilled workers aged 20-40.

And many cite their reason for wanting to quit as immigration to these shores – and the burden it is placing on their communities and local authorities. The dearth of good schools, spiralling house prices, rising crime and tax increases are also driving people away.

Obtaining a visa to live abroad can cost as little as £1,500 for the right candidates. Plumbers, electricians, construction workers and doctors are famously in demand. The only obstruction to emigration from the UK is a criminal record, poor health, advancing age and being a “third country national”.

Liam Clifford, a former immigration control officer, set up globalvisas.com as a one-man band 12 years ago. He now employs 60 people and is in the process of opening new offices in both South Africa and Australia. Mr Clifford said: “It’s absolutely phenomenal. People are trying to get away to wherever they can, and most are successful.

“Ironically, one of the main reasons for leaving is the overstretch of services due to increasing immigration into the UK. People are looking for the better standard of living offered by other countries, as even the most idyllic villages in Britain are under pressure from rising populations.

Skilled labour is obviously an advantage, but so is speaking the English language. Most countries are harder to get into if you don’t speak English. UK plc simply isn’t fighting hard enough to keep its people. Some are telling us they are fed up with living in this country. Even business people are saying they’ve had enough.

“They’re saying ‘I can’t put my children into the right school, but if I move abroad I can’. Most people are very patriotic and don’t want to leave. They’re almost terrified about it. But they say they just have to.

“It’s a shame people at the top don’t recognise they’re not doing enough to retain highly skilled workers in this country. A lot of them are quite young, and they’re not idle. They just can’t see a future for themselves in this country. They want to get married and settle down and buy homes, but they can’t see it happening here.

“And time and time again they are saying to us they don’t want to be seen as racist because they are quitting because of immigration. We tell them of course they’re not.”

According to the most recent Office of National Statistics figures, in 2005 the official number of people leaving UK shores was 352,000 – up from 249,000 in 1995. The majority – around 150,000 – migrated from London and the south east.

Among those who headed out were Simon Blood, 26, and Rachel Roberts, 23, who moved to Australia four months ago. The couple, from Stoke-on-Trent, are loving their new life in far north Queensland so much that they’ve decided it’s permanent.

Apart from family, football and a few television programmes, there’s nothing they miss about home. Embracing the warmest winter they’ve ever known – averaging 24C daily – both relish the commute to work which takes just five minutes, leaving plenty of time for walks on the beach.

Simon, a marketing executive, and Rachel, a nurse, followed their dream after seeing a newspaper advertisement for nursing recruits Down Under.

“It all went very smoothly,” said Simon. “It’s beautiful here and we’ve no plans to go back for good.”

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HOW THE GOVERNMENT HAS DECLARED WAR ON WHITE ENGLISH PEOPLE

2007-08-13T16:28:00.000-07:00

England is in the middle of a profoundly disturbing social experiment. For the first time in a mature democracy, a Government is waging a campaign of aggressive discrimination against its indigenous population.

In the name of cultural diversity, Labour attacks anything that smacks of Englishness. The mainstream public are treated with contempt, their rights ignored, their history trashed. In their own land, the English are being turned into second-class citizens.

This trend was highlighted this week by the case of Abigail Howarth, a bright teenager who applied for a training position with the Environment Agency in East Anglia but was turned down because she was too white and English. The post, which carries a £13,000 grant, was open only to ethnic minorities, including the Scots, Welsh and Irish.

Such social engineering was justified by the Agency on the grounds that minorities were under-represented in its workforce, the parrot cry used by bureaucrats throughout the public sector to justify bias against the English.

Though Abigail’s case rightly caused outrage, it was not unique. This kind of reverse discrimination is now rife across the state machine, underwritten by the very English taxpayers who are the targets of institutional prejudice.

Although it is technically illegal to restrict jobs to certain ethnic groups, the racially fixated commissars have found a way round that problem by developing training schemes open only to minorities. Under the 1976 Race Relations Act it is permissible to use racial considerations in recruitment to trainee positions such as the one to which Abigail applied.

Such practices are dressed up as “positive action” to widen diversity and, in the words of one Labour council, “to overcome past discrimination”. So HM Revenue and Customs offers work experience jobs, worth up to £15,900 a year pro-rata, to ethnic minority graduates, while the Museums Association has two-year ethnic minority apprenticeships.

Similarly, Birmingham City Council gives £16,000 a year to “black and minority ethnic individuals” in its “Positive Action Traineeship Scheme”, and a £10,000 allowance to clerical trainees from “the Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities”.

Discriminatory training schemes can also be found in ITV, the civil service and the NHS, which boasts “a management development programme specifically designed and tailored to the needs of black and minority ethnic midwives”.

It was revealed last year that Avon and Somerset Constab-ulary rejected 186 applications from white men on the grounds that they were already “over-represented” in the force. In the same way, London Mayor Ken Livingstone last month refused to endorse a series of nominations for the London Fire Authority because they were dominated by whites.

And whole towns are beginning to suffer state disapproval. Eighty administrative jobs in the Prison Service have recently been transferred from Corby in Northamptonshire to Leicester because, as the Home Office admitted, Corby’s population is predominantly “white British”, a terrible sin in our multicultural society.

It is a bitter irony that the Labour Government, which works itself into such a synthetic rage over racial prejudice, should practise overt discrimination on an epic scale. The remorseless focus on supporting minorities has led to a perverted ideology of anti-white racism.

Almost every interaction with any public service now leads to a detailed analysis of one’s ethnic status. A vast race equality industry has been built up, filled with overpaid paper shufflers, consultants and advisers with little to do except invent new grievances.

There is an air of the Maoist permanent revolution about their activities. Since immigration now runs at probably one million people a year, the make-up of society is changing dramatically. So, in this climate of endless demographic upheaval, the race relations brigade will always be able to invent more work for itself.

Yet anti-English discrimination undermines the central plank of the propaganda for mass immigration. We are constantly told we need vast influxes of foreigners to boost our economy and fill vacancies but unemployment levels in immigrant communities are so high and skills so lacking that we need to reserve parts of our economy for them. So if we have to spend a fortune on training schemes, why are we inviting hundreds of thousands of arrivals from the Third World and Eastern Europe here every year?

Economics have little to do with the issue. The Left in Britain have seized on mass immigration and multiculturalism as a battering ram to destroy the society they despise. They once sought to change our country through economic revolution. That failed with the Winter of Discontent and the downfall of communism. But demographic change through migration has proved far more damaging.

George Orwell once wrote: “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In Left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.”

That is now precisely the mentality that predominates within the machinery of the British state. And our country is dying as a result.

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Nearly half US murder victims are black: report

2007-08-10T18:31:00.000-07:00

African-Americans are victims of nearly half the murders committed in the United States despite making up only 13 percent of the population, a report published Thursday showed.

Around 8,000 of nearly 16,500 murder victims in 2005, or 49 percent, were black Americans, according to the report released by the statistics bureau of the Department of Justice.

Broken down by gender, 6,800 black men were murdered in 2005, making up more than half the nearly 13,000 male murder victims.

Black women made up 35 percent, or 1,200, of the nearly 3,500 female homicide victims.

Young black men aged between 17 and 29 bore a disproportionately high burden in the grim statistics, making up 51 percent of African-American murder victims.

The percentage of white male murder victims in the same age group was 37 percent.

More than half the murders of blacks took place in densely populated urban areas.

Firearms were involved 77 percent of the time in homicides involving black people and around 60 percent of the time in murders of whites.

Most murder victims -- 93 percent of blacks and 85 percent of whites -- were killed by someone of their own race.

Gang violence was involved in around five percent of homicides with black victims against seven percent for white victims.

In percentage terms, whites were twice as likely to be killed by a current or former partner than blacks -- 12 percent of whites were murdered by a life partner against six percent of blacks.

Blacks were also at greater risk of rape or sexual assault than any other ethnic group except American Indians, the report showed.

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"In a study covering five different periods of history, from 300 AD to the present day, and geographically spread across much of Europe, scientists ha

2007-08-09T16:36:00.000-07:00

"In a study covering five different periods of history, from 300 AD to the present day, and geographically spread across much of Europe, scientists have extracted the mitochondrial DNA from a sizable number of individuals in an effort to examine changes in diversity. The results, published in the Royal Society journal is intriguing to say the least. 1700 years ago, three out of every four individuals belonged to a different haplotype. In modern Europe, the number is only one in three. The researchers blame a combination of plague, selection of dominant lineages and culturally-inflicted distortions. The researchers say more work needs to be done, but are unclear if this involves archaeology or experiments involving skewing the data in the local female population."

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English Less Diverse Than 1,000 Years Ago, DNA Study Finds

2007-08-09T15:38:00.000-07:00

English people are less genetically diverse today than they were in the days of the Vikings, possibly due to two deadly plagues that swept their country centuries ago, a new study says. The study compared DNA from ancient and modern Englanders and found that the country has a smaller gene pool than it did a thousand years ago.

The findings come in contrast to modern England's reputation as a cultural melting pot, where in many major cities you are as likely to hear Urdu (from India) or Yoruba (from Nigeria) being spoken on the streets as English.

"The findings were unexpected. Modern England is the result of centuries of mixing cultures, and so higher diversity was expected," said Rus Hoelzel, a geneticist from the Britain's University of Durham, who led the study.

Hoelzel and his colleagues obtained DNA samples from the skeletal remains of 48 ancient Britons who lived between A.D. 300 and 1000.

The researchers studied the mitochondrial part of the DNA, which is passed down from mothers to their children (see an overview of human genetics).

By comparing this DNA with that of thousands of people from various ethnic backgrounds living in England today, they found that genetic diversity was greater in the ancient population.

The team also compared the ancient DNA with samples from people living in continental Europe and the Middle East, and found a similar lack of genetic variety.

"Few of the modern populations were as diverse as our ancient sample," Hoelzel said, adding that his team analyzed 6,320 modern samples in all.

The findings are published in the journal Biology Letters.

Plague Wipe-Out

One possible explanation for this narrowing of diversity might be two major outbreaks of bubonic plague that swept England and much of Europe—the Black Death (1347-1351) and The Great Plague (1665-1666)—Hoelzel said.

DNA Damage?

Not everyone is convinced by the new findings.

Mark Thomas, a geneticist at University College London, thinks the reduction in diversity can be explained in a more mundane way.

"Ancient DNA tends to elevate diversity, because the way DNA is damaged over time tends to mimic the mutations that lead to diversity," he said.

The way that DNA degrades after a person's death can make ancient DNA appear to have more variation than modern DNA, he explained.

Willerslev, the expert in ancient DNA agreed, saying, "DNA damage, an artifact of the data, is the other obvious explanation for this decrease in diversity."

Hoelzel countered that DNA damage couldn't explain the changes his team observed.

"We undertook multiple controls to ensure that DNA contamination and post-mortem change could not explain the change in diversity," he said.

Meanwhile, Thomas said he also doubts that the Black Death and the Great Plague would have caused enough reduction in population to explain the drop in diversity.

"The population reduction would have had to be extreme in absolute, rather than relative, numbers to cause the loss of diversity claimed," Thomas said.

Hoelzel responded that the loss was not simply the result of the sheer numbers killed by the plagues, but rather was a function of the particular genetic lines that disappeared during the epidemics.

"A typical population bottleneck [an extreme reduction in numbers] couldn't explain the loss—too many [people] are known to have survived," he said.

"It would need instead to be related to the differential survival of families, or natural selection, but either mechanism could explain the loss observed."

LINK

Penn And Teller Get Hippies To Sign Water Banning Petition

2007-08-09T15:10:00.000-07:00

Once were warriors: gene linked to Maori violence

2007-08-08T17:26:00.001-07:00

MAORIS carry a "warrior" gene that makes them more prone to violence, criminal acts and risky behaviour, a scientist has controversially claimed.

Dr Rod Lea, a New Zealand researcher, and his colleagues told an Australian genetics conference that Maori men had a "striking over-representation" of monoamine oxidase - dubbed the warrior gene - which they say is strongly associated with aggressive behaviour.

He says the unpublished studies prove that Maoris have the highest prevalence of this strength gene, first discovered by US researchers but never linked to an ethnic group.

This explains how Maoris migrated across the Pacific and survived, said Dr Lea, a genetic epidemiologist at the New Zealand Institute of Environmental Science and Research.

But he said the presence of the gene also "goes a long way to explaining some of the problems Maoris have".

"Obviously, this means they are going to be more aggressive and violent and more likely to get involved in risk-taking behaviour like gambling," Dr Lea said before his presentation to the International Congress of Human Genetics in Brisbane.

Dr Lea said he believed other, non-genetic factors might also be at play. "There are lots of lifestyle, upbringing-related exposures that could be relevant here, so obviously the gene won't automatically make you a criminal."

The same gene was linked to high rates of alcoholism and smoking. "In terms of alcohol-metabolising genes we've found that Maori have a very unique genetic signature," Dr Lea said.

"That influences their drinking behaviour, so they're much more likely to binge drink than other groups …"

The researchers are now collecting thousands of DNA samples from Maoris to investigate these traits.

They can then work out precisely what role each gene plays and use this to explore these trends in the mainstream populations.

"With Maori it's easier to find the genes than it is in the broader Caucasian population so it's a great case study," Dr Lea said.

LINK

Facial expressions run in the family

2007-08-08T16:57:00.000-07:00

Do you look like your father when you're angry? Probably more than you'd imagined. Facial expressions may be inherited, Israeli researchers say.

According to scientists, every person has a set of facial expressions that is unique to them, a signature of their identity that remains stable over time. Stable patterns of facial expressions arise before a baby is six months old, but until now, scientists were unsure whether these patterns were learned or innate.

"We were interested to examine whether there is a unique family facial expression signature," said lead author Gili Peleg from the University of Hafa in Israel. "We [correctly] assumed that we would find similarities between the facial expressions of relatives."

The study, which is published today in the U.S. journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, involved 21 participants who had been blind from birth, each with either one or two relatives who had normal vision. According to the researchers, blind individuals have no way of learning the facial expressions of their relatives by mimicry. The common perception that blind people touch other's faces to sense their expressions was revealed to be, in fact, very impolite behaviour.

The scientists induced six emotional states in each individual - sadness, anger, joy, think-concentrate, disgust and surprise - and then documented all the facial movements the person made while experiencing a particular emotion.

Forty-three different facial movements were recorded, including movements such as: biting the lower lip on the left-hand side; moving the lips while pressed together, as though chewing; rolling the upper lip inside the mouth; sticking out the tongue slightly while touching both lips; and pulling down the corners of the mouth while pushing the chin forward.

A computer program was used to allocate the blind individual to a family according to the types of movements observed and their frequencies. The blind individual was allocated to the correct family 80 per cent of the time when using information from all six emotional states.

"These findings indicate the existence of a hereditary basis for facial expressions," Peleg explained.

When each emotional state was analysed separately, the computer correctly allocated the blind individual to his or her family most often for the negative emotion anger, at 75 per cent.

"Negative emotions increase the frequency and diversity of facial movements. The chance to find similar movements raises in a situation in which more facial movements are displayed," according to Peleg.

To induce a state of anger, the researchers asked each person to relate a past experience which caused them to feel angry. The individuals were encouraged to use as much detail as possible in order to relive the experience. This was also how sadness and joy were induced.

Think-concentrate is an "intellectual emotion" first described by Charles Darwin in 1872. This emotional state was evoked by asking individuals to solve a few puzzles of increasing difficulty. While they were concentrating on a puzzle, surprise was induced by suddenly asking the individual a question in gibberish. To induce disgust, they were told a story that included "disgusting" details.

This study paves the way for discovery of the genes that influence facial expressions. According to the researchers, "Genes may control muscles' and bones' structure, innervation and even perception." Further research will explore the evolutionary significance of these heritable facial expressions.

LINK

Who’s a Nerd, Anyway?

2007-08-07T20:04:00.000-07:00

What is a nerd? Mary Bucholtz, a linguist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been working on the question for the last 12 years. She has gone to high schools and colleges, mainly in California, and asked students from different crowds to think about the idea of nerdiness and who among their peers should be considered a nerd; students have also “reported” themselves. Nerdiness, she has concluded, is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior. People who are considered nerds tend to act in ways that are, as she puts it, “hyperwhite.”

While the word “nerd” has been used since the 1950s, its origin remains elusive. Nerds, however, are easy to find everywhere. Being a nerd has become a widely accepted and even proud identity, and nerds have carved out a comfortable niche in popular culture; “nerdcore” rappers, who wear pocket protectors and write paeans to computer routing devices, are in vogue, and TV networks continue to run shows with titles like “Beauty and the Geek.” As a linguist, Bucholtz understands nerdiness first and foremost as a way of using language. In a 2001 paper, “The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness,” and other works, including a book in progress, Bucholtz notes that the “hegemonic” “cool white” kids use a limited amount of African-American vernacular English; they may say “blood” in lieu of “friend,” or drop the “g” in “playing.” But the nerds she has interviewed, mostly white kids, punctiliously adhere to Standard English. They often favor Greco-Latinate words over Germanic ones (“it’s my observation” instead of “I think”), a preference that lends an air of scientific detachment. They’re aware they speak distinctively, and they use language as a badge of membership in their cliques. One nerd girl Bucholtz observed performed a typically nerdy feat when asked to discuss “blood” as a slang term; she replied: “B-L-O-O-D. The word is blood,” evoking the format of a spelling bee. She went on, “That’s the stuff which is inside of your veins,” humorously using a literal definition. Nerds are not simply victims of the prevailing social codes about what’s appropriate and what’s cool; they actively shape their own identities and put those codes in question.

Though Bucholtz uses the term “hyperwhite” to describe nerd language in particular, she claims that the “symbolic resources of an extreme whiteness” can be used elsewhere. After all, “trends in music, dance, fashion, sports and language in a variety of youth subcultures are often traceable to an African-American source,” but “unlike the styles of cool European American students, in nerdiness, African-American culture and language [do] not play even a covert role.” Certainly, “hyperwhite” seems a good word for the sartorial choices of paradigmatic nerds. While a stereotypical black youth, from the zoot-suit era through the bling years, wears flashy clothes, chosen for their aesthetic value, nerdy clothing is purely practical: pocket protectors, belt sheaths for gadgets, short shorts for excessive heat, etc. Indeed, “hyperwhite” works as a description for nearly everything we intuitively associate with nerds, which is why Hollywood has long traded in jokes that try to capitalize on the emotional dissonance of nerds acting black (Eugene Levy saying, “You got me straight trippin’, boo”) and black people being nerds (the characters Urkel and Carlton in the sitcoms “Family Matters” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”).

By cultivating an identity perceived as white to the point of excess, nerds deny themselves the aura of normality that is usually one of the perks of being white. Bucholtz sees something to admire here. In declining to appropriate African-American youth culture, thereby “refusing to exercise the racial privilege upon which white youth cultures are founded,” she writes, nerds may even be viewed as “traitors to whiteness.” You might say they know that a culture based on theft is a culture not worth having. On the other hand, the code of conspicuous intellectualism in the nerd cliques Bucholtz observed may shut out “black students who chose not to openly display their abilities.” This is especially disturbing at a time when African-American students can be stigmatized by other African-American students if they’re too obviously diligent about school. Even more problematic, “Nerds’ dismissal of black cultural practices often led them to discount the possibility of friendship with black students,” even if the nerds were involved in political activities like protesting against the dismantling of affirmative action in California schools. If nerdiness, as Bucholtz suggests, can be a rebellion against the cool white kids and their use of black culture, it’s a rebellion with a limited membership.

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Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

2007-08-07T20:03:00.000-07:00

A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets
and Their Effects

BY

WESTON A. PRICE, MS., D.D.S., F.A.G.D

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Research on facial attractiveness with regards to women

2007-08-07T20:01:00.001-07:00

Research on facial attractiveness has pointed out that the presence of childlike facial features increases attractiveness. These are:

* Large head
* Large curved forehead
* Facial elements (eyes, nose, mouth) located relatively low
* Large, round eyes
* Small, short nose
* Round cheeks
* Small chin

The prototype for a "child woman" is Brigitte Bardot. The reason why childlike women are perceived as being more attractive, is a biological one: Evolutionary biologists argue that men have an reproductive advantage when preferring young women as mating partners since they are likely to be healthy and still having a long period of fertility ahead of them. Thus, he can have many children with young women which means that he can successfully pass on his genes to his descendants.

However, this idea is more than debatable. But why? Well, we mentioned above that characteristics of mature females contribute to facial attractiveness, too. These are, for instance, high and pronounced cheekbones and concave cheeks (note: this is the opposite of the childlike, round cheeks!). The biological reason for this is that these characteristics signal the man to have found a sexually mature and fertile woman. Some researchers on attractiveness (e.g. Karl Grammer) are convinced that childlike facial characteristics just make female faces look younger, but not more attractive.

In order to examine the so-called "babyfaceness hypothesis", we produced several variants of selected female faces. The variants all had different levels of childlike facial proportions and were judged for attractiveness by test subjects.

This is how we went about: we computed an "average child face" using the four original images. Subsequently, we selected several attractive woman faces. By using the morphing technique we gradually warped the facial shape of the female faces into the shape of the scheme of childlike characteristics. Only the proportions of the faces were manipulated, not the faces itself! We produced six variations of each selected female face:

view Link

For each set of female faces, the test subjects were asked to indicate which version they found most attractive. The results of this experiment show clearly that childlike characteristics (large, round eyes, a large curved forehead as well as small short nose and chin) can enhance attractiveness. Only very few (9,5%) test subjects rated mature "original women" as being most attractive. Most of the preferred female faces contained childlike proportions of 10 - 50% (for details see report!). This means that even the most attractive women become even more beautiful, if facial proportions are made more childlike. And again: women who were rated as being most attractive do not exist in reality!

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Germany Agonizes Over a Brain Drain

2007-08-05T23:50:00.000-07:00

Benedikt Thoma recalls the moment he began to think seriously about leaving Germany. It was in 2004, at a New Year’s Day reception in nearby Frankfurt, and the guest speaker, a prominent politician, was lamenting the fact that every year thousands of educated Germans turn their backs on their homeland.

“That struck me like a bolt of lightning,” said Mr. Thoma, 44, an engineer then running his family’s elevator company. “I asked myself, ‘Why should I stay here when the future is brighter someplace else?’ ”

In December, as his work with the company became an intolerable grind because of labor disputes, Mr. Thoma quit and made plans to move to Canada. In its wide-open spaces he hopes to find the future that he says is dwindling at home. As soon as he lands a job, Mr. Thoma, his wife, Petra, and their two teenage sons will join the ranks of Germany’s emigrants.

There has been a steady exodus over the years, but it has recently become Topic A in a land already saddled with one of the most rapidly aging and shrinking populations of any Western nation. With evidence that more professionals are leaving now than in past years, politicians and business executives warn about the loss of their country’s best and brightest.

Among the more popular programs on German television is “Goodbye Deutschland!: The Emigrants,” a 12-part series chronicling several families who have forsaken Germany for South Africa or southern Spain.

The trigger for this latest bout of angst was the release last fall of new government statistics showing that 144,800 Germans emigrated in 2005, up from 109,500 in 2001. At the same time, only 128,100 Germans returned, a decline of nearly 50,000 from the year before. That made it the first year in nearly four decades that more people left than came home.

Demographic experts also say the nature of the emigrants is changing. These are not just young unskilled workers like those who fled the economically blighted eastern part of Germany after the country was reunified in 1990 to work in restaurants in Austria or Switzerland.

They are doctors, engineers, architects and scientists — just the sort of highly educated professionals that Germany needs to compete with economic up-and-comers like China and India.

“It’s not a problem of numbers as much as brain drain,” said Reiner Klingholz, the director of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development. “What we desperately need in the near future are talented and qualified people to replace those who will retire in 15 to 20 years.”

Other experts contend, though, that such fears are overblown. Germany has long sent its scientists and engineers to work or study abroad, they say, with the number of returnees historically balancing out those who leave. The latest statistics merely reflect an acceleration of that trend, as German academia and industry adjust to an increasingly global economy.

“Whenever the subject of migration comes up, Germans get very nervous,” said Claudia Diehl, a sociologist at the University of Göttingen who has studied migration patterns. “First they were nervous about people coming; now they are worried about people leaving.”

The numbers, she said, may also overstate the incidence of brain drain, because they do not distinguish between native and naturalized Germans. For example, Turkish guest workers who adopt German citizenship and later go home are classified as German emigrants.

Germany is not the only European country losing people. Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative presidential candidate in France, recently held a rally in London, home to 300,000 French citizens living in Britain, urging them to return and “make France a great nation.”

The number of French citizens living in Britain jumped 8.4 percent in 2005, according to government statistics. But the total number of French people living outside the country grew only 1.2 percent, or 15,300 people, roughly equivalent to Germany’s net loss of about 16,700 citizens.

Caveats aside, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that Germany has become less attractive for people in fields like medicine, academic research and engineering. Those who leave cite chronic unemployment, a rigid labor market, stifling bureaucracy, high taxes and the plodding economy — which, though better recently, still lags behind that of the United States.

As Dr. Friedrich Boettner, a German orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, puts it: “I make more money. I’ve got more opportunity. New York was the chance of my lifetime.”

German salaries, he said, are not competitive with those in the United States or Britain, and the hierarchical structure of some professions in Germany discourages ambitious young people from staying. The medical field, in which advancement is controlled by powerful chief doctors, has been hit particularly hard, with 2,300 doctors leaving in 2005 alone.

“In Germany, it is nearly impossible to make a medical career unless you go into a pipeline and wait for your time,” said Helmut Schwarz, vice president of the German Research Foundation. “You’ve got little time to pursue research, and you’re under the thumb of your director.”

In Mr. Thoma’s view, the root of the problem is deeper. Germany, he said, has a “blockage” in its society.

“Germans are so complacent,” he said, sitting at the dining table in his neat-as-a-pin home here. “They don’t want to change anything. Everything is discussed endlessly without ever reaching a solution.”

As an example he cites the stalemate between his family’s firm and its 89 employees. After the firm became unionized, he said, the two sides began bickering over wages and working conditions.

With much of his 80-hour workweeks eaten up by those disputes, Mr. Thoma said he had developed high blood pressure and other ailments. He told his brothers he was burned out and ready to leave.

With an engineering degree and a nest egg from his stake in the family firm, he should have no problem leaving. While the European Union’s expansion has given Germans more options, their two favorite destinations are outside it: Switzerland and the United States.

Surveying the map, Mr. Thoma settled on Canada, which his family had visited six years ago and loved. They were drawn to the natural beauty and the sense of possibility. They also viewed it as a compromise between the social model of Europe and the market orientation of the United States.

Mr. Thoma confessed to doubts about how many jobs Canada had for someone with his specialty. He has sent out his résumé and will go to Toronto this month to scout for work. “My problem is that I’m not a truck driver,” he said with a shrug. “Canada has a shortage of truck drivers.”

Despite the trauma of starting over, Mr. Thoma and his wife said they were sure their children would have a better future in Canada. When pressed, the couple could come up with only two things they would miss about home: German television and driving on the autobahn.

The government of Chancellor Angela Merkel is trying to improve Germany’s attractiveness with several initiatives, including a plan to create more competitive universities to lure back expatriate researchers.

But while the country’s economy regained traction in 2006, Mrs. Merkel has made little progress in loosening the labor market. A campaign to scale down health care spending was tied up by politics, resulting in a modification that critics say hardly deserves the name reform.

The health care debate drove 20,000 physicians into the streets last year to demonstrate for higher wages and better working conditions. Many are not waiting around to see if things improve.

Dr. Nina Lenhoff, 31, from Münster, moved to London for training in psychiatry because she thought it would be nice to live in another country. “But once I got here, I was just amazed,” she said.

Her salary is nearly double what she earned in Germany, and when she had a baby 18 months ago she was able to work part time — something she said would not have been possible in Germany.

The same is true for Dr. Boettner, 35, who studied orthopedics in Münster and got a taste of New York when he trained for a year in arthroplasty, or joint replacement, at the Hospital for Special Surgery.

Back home in 2001, Dr. Boettner found that Germany did not appreciate that specialty. He also dreaded the formality of the medical system, rooted in a society where people still address their superiors with formal titles like “Herr Professor Doktor.”

When the Hospital for Special Surgery offered Dr. Boettner his own practice last year — at a starting salary three times what he would be earning at home — it was not a tough call. Now ensconced on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with his wife and two daughters, he said he could not imagine going home. He knows other German expatriates who feel the same.

“If you ask me about doctors, lawyers or engineers who are in their 30s and have made it in Germany,” he said, “I don’t know of anyone.”

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Report: 1 million Iraqis may flee in '07

2007-08-05T23:46:00.000-07:00

Unrelenting violence and insecurity in Iraq could cause as many as 1 million Iraqis to flee their homes this year, the world's migration body said Friday.
"The numbers of people that are being displaced are increasing every day," said Jemini Pandaya, spokeswoman for the International Organization for Migration. "The security situation is not improving. It's not changing."

Pandaya said the organization's estimate was made "on the assumption that security conditions will continue much as they are."

The possibility of neighboring countries, such as Syria, closing their borders would mean even more of the displaced would only be able to get as far as other parts of Iraq.

On Thursday, the U.N. refugee agency appealed to the European Union to do more to protect refugees fleeing Iraq, saying the war was the cause of the biggest displacement of people in the Middle East in recent history.

"The humanitarian situation is grave and deteriorating. States should respond to the protection needs of Iraqi asylum seekers on their territory," said Madeline Garlick, a spokeswoman for the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Brussels.

That appeal came a day after Washington announced it will allow about 7,000 Iraqis into the United States this year — up from 202 in 2006 — and will pay more to help Iraq's neighbors cope with the surge of refugees.

As the bloodshed in Iraq has increased, European governments have come under increasing pressure to open their doors to asylum-seekers. Many are worried that an escalation in violence in 2007 could generate a fresh wave of refugees.

The U.N. appeal came as the EU announced it would contribute $13 million more for Iraqi refugees. About 60 percent will go to help those who have fled to Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

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Low IQ inmates a 'hidden problem'

2007-08-05T23:41:00.000-07:00

Nearly 6,000 British prisoners have low IQs, according to new research by the University of Liverpool on behalf of the Prison Reform Trust (PRT).
Inmates at Liverpool men's prison, Styal women's prison in Cheshire, and a young offenders' prison in Hindley, near Wigan, took part in the survey.

Projected figures showed that a quarter of British prisoners have an IQ of less than 80 - the national average is 100.

The charity said the research indicated a "vast hidden problem".

PRT director Juliet Lyon said: "This research reveals for the first time that high numbers of people with learning disabilities and difficulties are held behind bars.

"It raises important questions about how they got caught up in the criminal justice system in the first place and whether those responsible for special education, social care and family support could have done more to prevent this".

She added that those with learning difficulties and disabilities in the criminal justice system were "left to wander between police station, court and prison."

The research has been released ahead of the launch in March of "No One Knows", a new UK-wide programme of work to investigate and improve the treatment of people with learning disabilities and difficulties in the criminal justice system.

Author Dr Pat Mottram said: "Overall our findings show that the average IQ of the prison population is 13 below the national average of 100.

"Many will struggle to make sense of their experience of imprisonment", she added.

Skills Minister Phil Hope welcomed the research, saying the government had set in motion major reforms of education for prisoners.

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Chimps Hunt Using Spears

2007-08-05T23:40:00.000-07:00

Chimpanzees 'hunt using spears'

Chimpanzees in Senegal have been observed making and using wooden spears to hunt other primates, according to a study in the journal Current Biology.

Researchers documented 22 cases of chimps fashioning tools to jab at smaller primates sheltering in cavities of hollow branches or tree trunks.

The report's authors, Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani, said the finding could have implications for human evolution.

Chimps had not been previously observed hunting other animals with tools.

Pruetz and Bertolani made the discovery at their research site in Fongoli, Senegal, between March 2005 and July 2006.

"There were hints that this behaviour might occur, but it was one time at a different site," said Jill Pruetz, assistant professor of anthropology at Iowa State University, US.

"While in Senegal for the spring semester, I saw about 13 different hunting bouts. So it really is habitual."

Jabbing weapon

Chimpanzees were observed jabbing the spears into hollow trunks or branches, over and over again. After the chimp removed the tool, it would frequently smell or lick it.

In the vast majority of cases, the chimps used the tools in the manner of a spear, not as probes. The researchers say they were using enough force to injure an animal that may have been hiding inside.

However, they did not photograph the behaviour, or capture it on film.

Senegal chimp Image: Iowa State University
Adolescent females exhibited the behaviour most frequently (Image: M Gaspersic)
In one case, Pruetz and Bertolani, from the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies in Cambridge, UK, witnessed a chimpanzee extract a bushbaby with a spear.

In most cases, the Fongoli chimpanzees carried out four or more steps to manufacture spears for hunting.

In all but one of the cases, chimps broke off a living branch to make their tool. They would then trim the side branches and leaves.

In a number of cases, chimps also trimmed the ends of the branch and stripped it of bark. Some chimps also sharpened the tip of the tool with their teeth.

Female lead

Adult males have long been regarded as the hunters in chimp groups.

But the authors of the paper in Current Biology said females, particularly adolescent females, and young chimps in general were seen exhibiting this behaviour more frequently than adult males.

"It's classic in primates that when there is a new innovation, particularly in terms of tool use, the younger generations pick it up very quickly. The last ones to pick up are adults, mainly the males," said Dr Pruetz, who led the National Geographic Society-funded project.

This is because young chimps pick the skill up from their mothers, with whom they spend a lot of their time.

"It's a niche that males seem to ignore," Dr Pruetz told BBC News.

Many areas where chimpanzees live are also home to the red colobus monkey, which the chimps hunt. However, the Senegal site is lacking in this species, so chimps may have needed to adopt a new hunting strategy to catch a different prey - bushbaby.

The authors conclude that their findings support a theory that females may have played a similarly important role in the evolution of tool technology among early humans.
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Pill That Can Boost Young Brains By Three Years

2007-08-05T23:37:00.002-07:00

A DAILY dose of healthy fats can boost the brain development of children by three years in only three months, according to startling research.

Children given capsules of omega-3 and omega-6 fats grew additional 'grey matter' which helps intelligence.

Brain scans which showed the evidence of changes were reinforced by results in tests of reading, concentration and short-term memory.

Youngsters who took part in the study increased their reading age by an average of a year and a quarter during the three month trial.

Scientists behind the study say they were astonished by the changes in the four participating children, who were aged between eight and 13.

Scans showed their brains developed three years in as many months as nerve fibres grew additional branches.

It suggests pupils across the country are deficient in 'smart fats' because the children in the study had typical youngsters' diets laden with refined sugar and junk food.

Professor Basant Puri, who led the research, believes mass supplementation of schoolchildren is now needed.

Because they are unlikely to consume optimum quantities of omega- 3 and omega-6 which are derived from oily fish and a pure form of evening primrose oil through eating normal diets alone, they need to be given the fats in the form of supplements.

His study adds to growing evidence that healthy fats can help improve children's learning power, concentration and behaviour even among those with no obvious problems.

The professor even believes many adults would benefit from additional healthy fats because they help keep brain degeneration at bay.

The scientist, who is professor of imaging and psychiatry at Imperial College London and consultant in neurological disorders at Hammersmith Hospital, has taken the supplements himself for three years.

The study, funded by TV production company Endemol, will feature in a Channel Five documentary on Thursday.

The children were given the supplement VegEPA, containing a combination of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. The youngsters took two capsules a day for three months and were encouraged to cut down on fatty snacks, fizzy drinks and become more active.

After three months, remarkable improvements were seen, according to Professor Puri.

The average increase in the children's reading age was a year and a quarter while their handwriting became more accurate and neater.

In one measurement of concentration, three children scored perfect results even though they are not top of the class at school. They also dramatically improved their short-term memory.

One boy who previously scorned books and was hooked on TV developed a love of reading and declared he was 'bored' with television.

However, the most striking finding emerged from the brain scans, which all suggested they had denser nerve fibres.

Professor Puri said: 'The results were astonishing. It was as if these were the brains of children three years older.' The Food Standards Agency reviewed the evidence but found the benefits were still a grey area. However, nutritionists are challenging the finding.

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'Stealth' gonorrhoea on the rise

2007-08-05T23:37:00.001-07:00

"Stealth" strains of gonorrhoea that fail to show up in tests are on the rise across the world, researchers have discovered, because the tests used by doctors to identify the bacteria look for an enzyme no longer present in those strains.

The rising prevalence of these strains was found in Australia, New Zealand, England, Scotland and Denmark. The findings should prompt clinics to change practice and use at least two tests that work in different ways to detect the infection, the scientists say.

The prolyliminopeptidase (PIP) enzyme was previously thought to be present in all strains of gonorrhoea and was therefore used in many diagnostic tests. However, mutations or deletions in the PIP gene that prevent the production of this enzyme had been identified in some strains. Gonorrhoea is known for its ability to mutate throughout its entire growth phase.

Magnus Unemo, a microbiologist at Orebro University Hospital, Sweden and colleagues examined a total of 41 samples lacking the PIP enzyme from patients in Australia, New Zealand and Scotland. The samples were obtained between 2001 and 2004.

To see how widespread this stealth strain is across the globe, they then compared these with samples from other studies in England and Denmark.

Widespread dissemination
All the samples from New Zealand and Scotland, and 83% of Australian samples, were indistinguishable or very similar to the English and Danish samples and had evolved from a single original strain. The data show "widespread dissemination" of the strain, the researchers say.

The strain was previously known to be circulating among homosexual men, but the new work suggests it has become a growing concern within the heterosexual population as well.

The strain did not appear resistant to the antibiotics typically used to treat gonorrhoea and all patients were given treatment.

Untreated gonorrhoea infections can cause severe and permanent health problems and can even be fatal. It can also cause infertility by harming the testicles or fallopian tubes. These risks mean it is "crucial that a rapid, highly sensitive and specific confirmation of N. gonorrhoeae is provided," the authors say.

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Sleepless nights may hinder moral judgment

2007-08-05T23:36:00.001-07:00

Sleep deprivation may lead not only to bleary-eyed mornings, but clouded moral judgment as well, a study suggests.

Army researchers found that when they subjected a group of volunteers to two sleepless nights, the lack of shut-eye seemed to hinder participants' ability to make decisions in the face of emotionally charged, moral dilemmas.

The dilemmas in this case were hypothetical scenarios, and not actual events. But the study authors say the findings could have implications for people who are both routinely sleep-deprived and often need to make quick decisions in a crisis -- such as soldiers in combat and medical professionals.

Dr. William D. S. Killgore and colleagues at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research report the findings in the journal Sleep.

In recent years, brain imaging studies have found that an area called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex appears to play an important role in forming moral judgments. There's also evidence that sleep deprivation lowers metabolic activity in this brain region, Killgore and colleagues point out.

It's possible, they speculate, that sleeplessness slows the brain's ability to integrate cognitive and emotional information, which is needed to address serious moral dilemmas.

The researchers based their findings on tests of 26 healthy military personnel. The volunteers were presented with various scenarios, then asked whether a given course of action would be "appropriate" or "inappropriate." The situations ranged from minor, morally inconsequential ones to serious personal dilemmas in which the decision would harm someone in order to protect someone else.

Study participants were presented with the scenarios before and after 53 hours of sleep deprivation.

In general, Killgore's team found, the volunteers took a longer time to mull over the morally charged questions when they were sleep-deprived than when they were well rested. This was not the case with the more minor, non-moral scenarios.

What's more, some volunteers changed their views of what was morally acceptable after they'd been awake for two days. This was not universally true, however; volunteers who, at the beginning of the study, scored high on a measure known as "emotional intelligence" did not waver on what they found morally appropriate.

Emotional intelligence refers to a person's ability to understand his or her own emotions and those of others, and to effectively relate to other people. The findings suggest that people with "particularly well-developed emotional/social capacities" are less susceptible to the effects of sleep deprivation on moral judgment, the investigators say.

There's some evidence that facets of emotional intelligence can be developed and improved, the researchers point out. It might be worthwhile, they write, to study the effects of emotional-skills training for people who routinely face moral dilemmas under stressful conditions.

SOURCE: Sleep, March 1, 2007.

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Obese couples have tougher time having babies

2007-08-05T23:35:00.001-07:00

Obese couples have a more difficult time conceiving a baby than couples of normal weight, according to a study published on Tuesday identifying another consequence of putting on too much weight.

Researchers tracked nearly 48,000 Danish couples between 1996 and 2002, including about 7,600 couples with both the man and woman either overweight or obese according to standards set by the World Health Organization.

They measured how long it took couples to conceive a baby once they began unprotected sex in a bid to have a child.

If both the man and woman were obese, their chances of having to wait longer than a year before the woman became pregnant were nearly three times higher than for couples of normal weight, the study found.

If the man and woman were both overweight, their likelihood of waiting longer than a year before pregnancy was 1.4 times higher.

While doctors already knew that extra weight could affect fertility in women and men as individuals, this study looked at what happened to the fertility of couples when both the man and woman were overweight.

Previous research had established that semen quality and levels of reproductive hormones were diminished in overweight men, and that being overweight can harm ovulation, conception and early fetal development in women.

“If a couple is obese or overweight and if they want to have a child, we would advise them to try and lose some weight,” lead researcher Cecilia Ramlau-Hansen of Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark and University of California Los Angeles, said in a telephone interview.

“Especially if they have tried to become pregnant for a while and haven’t succeeded, then losing weight might help them,” Ramlau-Hansen added.

Less sex?
She said the study did not examine whether heavier couples had sex less frequently than normal weight pairs.

“If, for example, the obese couples hardly ever had sex then, of course, the chances of becoming pregnant would be reduced. But we don’t know that at all,” Ramlau-Hansen added.

The research did not look at whether sterility occurred more often in obese or overweight couples.

“No, we don’t think obesity can make people sterile. But we think that the heavier they get, the longer it will take them to become pregnant,” Ramlau-Hansen added.

The findings were published in the journal Human Reproduction.

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Risky pregnancies are rising, and succeeding

2007-08-05T23:34:00.000-07:00

High-risk pregnancies are on the rise in the United States and may be more common now than at any other time since modern obstetric care became available.

Why? More fortysomething moms are having babies, and epidemics of diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure are causing pregnancy and birth complications.

But in this otherwise troubling trend is also some good news: A small but growing number of women are successfully having children despite life-threatening conditions that once made a safe pregnancy almost inconceivable.

Exact numbers are not available, but doctors say that tens of thousands of organ transplant recipients, breast cancer survivors, women with heart defects and even women with the AIDS virus have decided to risk childbearing in the last several years.

Not all of these stories have happy endings, and many people worry that some of these women will not live long enough to raise their children, or that they will pass on their medical problems.

But most results have been so surprisingly good that they are overturning decades of gloomy dogma about who is medically fit to have a child.

“These people define a whole new era of pregnancy for us,” said Temple University’s Dr. Vincent Armenti, who runs a registry that tracks births to transplant patients.

“We have to change our mindset about the perfect pregnancy,” he said. Women should be given advice based on solid research “instead of an emotional feeling that some people just shouldn’t have a baby.”

Complicated pregnancies becoming routine

No one knows precisely how many high-risk pregnancies there are. It is a catchall term that in the past has meant the mom is over 35 or has a condition like high blood pressure that is dangerous for her or her fetus. But as these situations have become more common, even this loose definition is changing.

Births to women 35 and older are soaring. And many complications are becoming so routine that nurse midwives can manage them instead of sending women to high-risk care specialists. Doctors around the country say they are treating far more of these risky cases than they did a decade ago.

“Patients are getting older, so by definition, they’re higher-risk. The diabetes rate is going through the roof, so that’s high-risk. More people with high blood pressure are getting pregnant. The list goes on and on,” leaving fewer women considered low-risk, said Dr. Jacques Moritz, director of gynecology at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City.

Dr. Mary D’Alton, the Columbia University Medical Center obstetrics chief who recently delivered twins to a 59-year-old woman, has replaced the term “high-risk” with a 1-to-10 scale.

Birth outcomes for older women and those with medical problems “have been better than we would expect,” although complications are more common, she said. For example, about half of organ transplant recipients give birth prematurely, although often by just a couple of weeks. “I don’t mean to paint a rosy picture, but I would want to paint an optimistic picture,” D’Alton said.

Dr. Gabrielle Fish felt optimistic when she decided to try pregnancy after her kidney transplant. Fish, of Cherry Hill, N.J., was in her mid-30s and had been stable on her anti-rejection drugs for two years. After researching pregnancies among transplant patients — there have been more than 1,000 in the last decade — she asked her doctors’ advice.

“They pretty much encouraged me. They said, ’You’re a healthy woman and you don’t want to wait till you’re high-risk because of your age,”’ Fish said.

The result: a healthy daughter, Madelyn, now 6. Fish said she feels lucky to have her, but would not try to have a second child.

CONTINUED: Aging moms and cancer survivors fuel trend

Carla Taylor also feels lucky. A delivery room nurse from New York, she was 42 when she discovered she was pregnant after having artery embolization to treat uterine fibroids. Such women are advised not to try pregnancy because the treatment plugs blood vessels that feed fibroids, and that might keep a fetus from growing properly.

Taylor had a healthy daughter, Bailey, now 6. Moritz, the gynecology director who works with Taylor at Roosevelt Hospital, said 16 of his patients have unexpectedly had children after the fibroid treatment and most have done well.

“Usually if they were able to get pregnant after the embolization, it means that blood supply to the uterus is pretty good,” he said. Doctors expect more of these cases as embolization becomes a popular option to hysterectomy for fibroids, which plague millions of women.

Other reasons high-risk pregnancies are increasing:

Older moms. In 2005, there were more than 104,000 births in the United States to women ages 40 through 44, and over 6,500 to women 45 and older. Advanced age raises the risk of birth defects.

Chronic health problems. Obesity among women ages 18 to 44 rose from under 9 percent in 1990 to almost 22 percent in 2005. Hospital admissions for diabetes or related conditions among pregnant women and new mothers rose from 175,655 in 1993 to 269,861 in 2004, says the March of Dimes. Admissions for high blood pressure rose from 260,222 to 403,271.

Multiple births, often the result of infertility treatment. In 2004, they made up more than 3 percent of all live births, up from about 2 percent in 1980. Such babies are more likely to be born prematurely and to have health problems.

More cancer survivors. Hundreds of thousands are in their prime childbearing years. “Pregnancy raises enormous concerns for women with a history of breast cancer because we know that many breast cancers are hormonally driven,” and high estrogen levels during pregnancy might raise the risk of relapse, said Julia Rowland, director of the National Cancer Institute’s Office of Cancer Survivorship. “They may also be concerned that they may not be here for a child.”

Better medical care. Women with congenital heart defects used to die young. Those who lived were urged not to get pregnant. Now many such defects can be fixed, and children of women with heart defects are having their own children.

More drugs. Nearly two-thirds of women who gave birth from 1996-2000 took a medication during pregnancy, a large federally funded study found. Of those, nearly 40 percent took a drug whose safety in pregnancy is not established, and nearly 5 percent took a drug potentially risky to the fetus. More pregnant women have taken new medicines for cancer, depression and other problems. More than 30 registries now track outcomes of pregnant women on various drugs.

Growing prevalence of HIV. Each year, about 6,000 to 7,000 HIV-infected American women give birth. Such pregnancies have been controversial because of the risk of spreading the virus to their babies. But modern AIDS drugs are so effective at protecting babies from the virus’ spread that more doctors are accepting these women’s choice to have children.

“I view HIV disease now as basically a chronic illness,” said Dr. Nancy Chescheir, obstetrics chief at Vanderbilt Medical Center. Despite several hundred births to infected moms at Vanderbilt, “we haven’t had an HIV transmission in six years,” she said.

D’Alton, the Columbia obstetrics chief, agreed.

“I just feel that these are very personal choices,” she said. D’Alton sees her job as giving good care and supporting those choices “as much as possible.”

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1940s IQ tests helping to reveal how lifestyle affects the brain

2007-08-05T23:31:00.000-07:00

REDISCOVERED IQ tests carried out on every 11-year-old child in Scotland 60 years ago have given scientists a unique opportunity to pinpoint factors which can damage the brain as well as the body.

Follow up tests on a number of the original study group show smoking, obesity, poor diet and lack of physical exercise known to contribute to diseases such as cancer and diabetes can also affect the mind.

Findings suggest that "dementing diseases" such as Alzheimer's are partly self-inflicted and could be delayed or avoided by a healthier lifestyle.

Scientists have also discovered a small group of men known as the "elite old" who have defied the logic of ageing and whose IQ and fitness levels have risen throughout their lives and appear to be still rising.

Actor Richard Wilson, who played Victor Meldrew in the BBC comedy One Foot in the Grave was one of the 1947 participants and is helping scientists publicise the project.

The 1947 Scottish Mental Survey, involving more than 70,000 school pupils, was sponsored by the Scottish Council for Research in Education. But results were filed away when education policies changed and lay undisturbed in the council's basement in Glasgow until tracked down decades later.

Ian Deary, professor of differential psychology at the University of Edinburgh, traced the ledgers after noticing a reference to the study in a book. "By tracking down and retesting the people in that study we can see how their mental powers have changed over the decades and what impact their lifestyles have had on those changes," Prof Deary said.

About 1,500 of those involved in the study have been traced in a joint effort between Prof Deary and Lawrence Whalley, professor of mental health at the University of Aberdeen.

Participants undertook a range of tests and were given an MRI scan of their brains to assess any deterioration caused by ageing.

Prof Whalley said lifestyle definitely affects the brain.

He explained: "What is emerging is that people who are brighter, more socially engaged, and who live healthy lives, retain their mental faculties as well as their physical health for much longer."

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Enzymes convert all donor blood to group O

2007-08-05T23:27:00.000-07:00

You're rushed into hospital and need a blood transfusion – but what is your blood group? In future, it may not matter, thanks to enzymes that scrub antigens from red blood cells, turning all donated blood into group O – which can be given safely to anyone.

The A and B antigens, which give blood groups their name, are sugars carried on the surface of red blood cells. Human red blood cells can carry one of these antigens, both, or neither; giving four blood groups: A, B, AB and O, respectively. Receiving mismatched blood can cause a life-threatening reaction, and errors are made in 1 in every 15,000 transfusions, on average.

In the 1980s, a team in New York, US, showed that an enzyme from green coffee beans could remove the B antigen from red blood cells. It proved too inefficient for practical use, but Henrik Clausen at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and colleagues have now screened bacteria and fungi for more powerful enzymes. "The diversity you get in the bacterial kingdom is much higher," Clausen explains.

The researchers homed in on two enzymes. One, from a gut bacterium called Bacteroides fragilis, removes the B antigen. The other, from Elizabethkingia meningosepticum – which causes opportunistic infections in people – targets the A antigen. The purified enzymes are highly efficient. For example, the B. fragilis enzyme is used up at only one-thousandth the rate of the coffee bean enzyme.

Clausen's team is working with a company called ZymeQuest in Beverly, Massachusetts, US, which plans clinical trials to test whether the treated blood is safe and effective. If so, the technology should be in hot demand, because group O blood – the only safe option if there is any doubt about the recipient's blood group – is a precious commodity.

"We're always in a shortage," says Richard Benjamin, chief medical officer with the American Red Cross in Washington DC, US.

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Migration ally reveals British brain drain

2007-08-05T23:26:00.000-07:00

International migration is eroding Britain's skills base with an exodus of professionals matching the arrival of low-skilled foreign migrants, the Government is to be warned.

The number of Britons emigrating has jumped in recent years, with a growing proportion leaving professional or managerial jobs to work overseas. By contrast, the number of immigrant workers - many of them manual workers - has risen sharply.

The extent of the problem will be revealed in the annual report on international migration from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), to be published this summer.

The section on Britain has been written by John Salt of University College London, an expert on migration and an adviser to the OECD and the European Union.

In it, he says: "The evidence suggests that migration flows are tending towards a deskilling of the UK labour market, which is gaining manual and clerical workers but losing professionals and managers."

The finding will call into question claims by ministers that immigration boosts the economy by helping employers to tackle skills shortages.

MPs and trade unions have already claimed that the arrival of migrant workers is driving down pay and reducing job opportunities for the established work force.

Prof Salt's report is also critical of the new points-based system for assessing the skills of would-be migrant workers, due to be launched by the Home Office later this year.

Under the new system, checks on candidates will be carried out by entry clearance officers and case workers based in the countries where the applications are made.

However, the report says: "A major concern is about the capacity of such a geographically distributed system to meet the criteria of objectivity, consistency and -transparency."

Until recently, business leaders were broadly supportive of the Government's position on migration.

However, a report last month by the British Chambers of Commerce revealed that seven out of 10 of its members are now opposed to unchecked immigration.

David Frost, the organisation's director general, said: "Outside London, we are increasingly seeing large numbers of white, unemployed males wandering the streets.

"This is not pointing to a bright and positive future. We need to engage with these people once more and get them trained up.

"Immigration is not solving today's problems but actually postpones them."

Between 2000 and 2005, a net total of 272,000 Britons emigrated, while a net total of 639,000 non-Britons moved to the UK.

Findings from the Government's international passenger survey, cited by Prof Salt, show that in 2005, 34 per cent of immigrants were professionals or managers before entering Britain, 29 per cent were in lower-grade jobs while 37 per cent were not in work.

By contrast, 42 per cent of emigrants were professionals or managers, 25 per cent were in other jobs and 33 per cent were not in work - often because they were retired.

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Spanish Parliament to Approve Broad Affirmative Action Law Boosting Women in Business

2007-08-05T23:19:00.000-07:00

Spain's Parliament headed toward approval Thursday of an affirmative action bill that aims to get more women in elected office and corporate boardrooms -- and more men changing diapers.

"Today is the first day of a different society," Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said during debate before a vote on the bill.

The highlight of the so-called Law of Equality grants 15 days of paternity leave to new fathers, changing a little-used, current arrangement in which mothers of newborns can lend all or part of their 10 weeks leave to the father. In 2013, the 15 days leave will expand to a month.

The bill has already been passed in the Senate and was expected to win approval Thursday in the lower chamber of parliament, the Chamber of Deputies.

Another provision of the bill says women must make up at least 40 percent of the lists of candidates that parties field in elections. It would be applied for the first time in May when Spain holds regional and municipal voting.

In the business world, where Spanish women are grossly underrepresented, companies that achieve more of a male-female balance among their executives and at lower levels will receive favorable treatment when they bid for government contracts.

Zapatero, who has made women's rights and gender equality a hallmark of a liberal-minded government that took power in 2004, said the law "will transform Spanish society forever and for the better."

Zapatero's 16-member Cabinet includes eight women, a first in Spain and one of the highest levels in Europe.

Other measures in the new program encourage the hiring of women in both the private sector and for government jobs. The jobless rate among Spanish women is 14.4 percent, compared to 7.5 percent among men.

The government has complained that, although Spanish universities churn out more female than male graduates, women are scarcely represented at senior levels in the Spanish business world.

Among the 35 companies that make up the Spanish stock market's main index, only 2 percent of board members are women, according to the government. Elsewhere in the European Union, the average is 8.5 percent, according to the Paris-based European Professional Women's Network.

In contrast, women were on nearly 15 percent of corporate boards at Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. in 2005, according to the New York-based research group Catalyst.

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Sex case exposes flawed US justice

2007-08-05T23:18:00.000-07:00

THERE were two quite distinct reactions to the dismissal of sexual assault charges against three Duke University lacrosse players, a racially charged case that roiled America.

The players wondered what would have happened to them if they had not come from well-off families who could afford the best legal advice. They said they never realised that such an injustice could happen in America.

The second reaction, from one of the player's lawyers, was to name and shame the woman who made the accusations.

The allegations against the lacrosse players stemmed from a party at some of the team's share house in Durham, North Carolina — a town divided between the elite university and mostly black locals. The lacrosse team hired two black strippers for entertainment. They stopped their performance after one player made a threatening remark.

The woman later told police she was forcibly separated from her companion, taken to a bathroom and raped by three of the men. The players, from prosperous interstate families, employed top-notch local attorneys. According to CBS News, their families spent between $3 million and $5 million defending them.

One of the players, Reade Seligmann, said his experience had opened his eyes to a "tragic world of injustice" that he never knew existed.

"If police officers and a district attorney can systematically railroad us with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, I can't imagine what they would do to people who do not have the resources to defend themselves." Another of the players, Collin Finnerty, said he would use this experience to stop "this ever happening again".

North Carolina's Attorney-General, Roy Cooper, said investigators had come to the conclusion that the woman believed what she was saying at the time to be true, and would not face charges.

Mr Cooper reserved his most scathing criticism for Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong, who he called a "rogue prosecutor". Mr Nifong, who eventually withdrew from the case and now faces ethics charges, declared the white lacrosse players guilty during his re-election campaign, in an apparent attempt to pander to the black community.

He also failed to use proper identification procedures, failed to tell the court or defence lawyers about DNA tests that failed to support his case, failed to listen to the players' defence, including, in one case, photographs and ATM records that provided a strong alibi, and failed to interview the accuser for nine months.

Mr Cooper said: "There were many points in this case where caution would have served justice better than bravado. This case shows the enormous consequences of over-reaching by a prosecutor."

Link.

Cell Phones Linked to Bee Decline

2007-08-05T23:16:00.000-07:00

Honey bee populations have suddenly begun to decline, and some British researchers think the proliferation of cell phones is a contributing cause.

A limited study at Landau University has found that bees will abandon their hives when cell phones are turned on and placed next to them.

What is known is that there are suddenly fewer bees to pollinate plants. In case after case bee keepers in the U.S. and Europe have reported something called Colony Collapse Disorder. In CCD, a hive's inhabitants desert the colony, leaving only queens and eggs.

CCD reports escalated sharply last fall, with bee populations falling as much as 60 percent on the West Coast and 70 percent on the East Coast. Not only does that impact honey production, it also poses a threat to food production, since bees are needed to pollinate plants.

While mass-produced crops like wheat and corn are pollinated by wind, some 90 cultivated flowering crops rely mostly on honeybees. According to a Cornell University study, honeybees pollinate every third bite of food ingested by Americans, and help generate some $14 billion in produce.

"Are honey bees the canary in the coal mine?" asks Jerry Hayes, an official with the Florida Department of Agriculture. "What are honey bees trying to tell us that we humans should be paying more attention to?"

While the cell phone theory might seem far fetched, the British study isn't the first to suggest that man's technology might be short circuiting bees' navigation systems. German researchers have show that bees' behavior is different near power lines.

A few scientists also think the introduction of genetically modified crops could also be linked to the sudden disappearance of the honey bee.

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Rising anti-Semitism in Israel meets state's blind eye

2007-08-05T23:14:00.002-07:00

Rabbi Avraham Levine never imagined that years after immigrating from Russia to Israel he would fall victim to a brutal anti-Semitic attack in the heart of the Jewish state.

But less than three months ago, he was beaten up by teenage skinheads as he walked home in the city of Petah Tikva on Tel Aviv's outskirts.

"They jumped on me, beat me and cursed my mother in Russian, then they returned with sticks and beat me up. My arm was broken but only God saved my life," said Levine, 38, who arrived in Israel from Russia in 1995.

"They shouted 'Zhids leave Russia!' In Russia, I would hit someone if he said 'zhid.' How can someone do it in Israel?" he said.

"Zhid" is a derogatory term in Russian for a Jew, roughly equivalent to north America's "kike."

The number of incidents with a neo-Nazi, fascist or anti-Semitic streak has increased dramatically over the past 15 years in the Jewish state, which prides itself of being a safe haven for Jews from all over the world, according to the Dmir Centre, which monitors and assists victims of such attacks.

Although the Jewish state is no stranger to anti-Israeli attacks, a new trend has developed since the 1990s -- anti-Semitic attacks carried out by "Jewish" citizens, says the centre's chief Zalman Gilichenski.

The vast majority of these incidents are thought to have been carried out by Russian nationalists who identify with anti-Semitic ideology, says Gilichenski.

"Nowadays it has become a phenomenon," says Gilichenski, a 40-year-old ultra-Orthodox who had emigrated from Moldova in 1989.

The nationalists came to Israel as part of the massive immigration wave from former Soviet states in the 1990s. While they are Jewish under Israel's law of return -- meaning that either they, one of their parents or one of their grandparents are Jewish -- they do not consider themselves as Jews.

Gilichenski receives reports of anti-Semitic incidents in Israel on a daily basis and he estimates there are some 500 incidents a year in Israel.

Official figures are hard to come by -- the police, and justice and interior ministries all refuse to provide statistics.

And Israeli police are reluctant to brand the incidents as anti-Semitic, instead using the term vandalism for racist attacks and desecration of graves and synagogues.

"The law does not provide us with the ability to even define an incident in Israel as being of an anti-Semitic character, and they all fall within the general term of vandalism," says one justice ministry official who asked to remain anonymous.

Petah Tikva police station closed Levine's case without finding the assailants, saying it was "an isolated case which does not reflect a trend", even though a series of similar incidents have occurred there in recent months.

Gilichenski says the authorities turn a blind eye: "Israel is very swift to criticise anti-Semitism abroad but remains silent in the face of anti-Semitism within."

There is no law explicitly banning anti-Semitism in Israel, because such a situation was never imagined by the lawmakers, he said.

According to Gilichenski, the increasing trend is partly due to the fact that out of the nearly 1.2 million immigrants who have arrived from ex-Soviet states since the early 1990s, over 300,000 do not consider themselves Jews, according to official figures from the Immigrant and Absorption Ministry.

"People who do not identify themselves as Jews arrive here, after learning about the Jewish people from the most extreme sources of anti-Semitism in former Soviet states," Gilichenski said.

"There is a group of several dozens anti-Semites in almost every Israeli city. All in all, there are several hundreds neo-Nazis in Israel," he says.

Despite the lack of official statistics, expressions of anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism in Israel are abundant.

Dozens of school and synagogue walls have been sprayed with swastikas and racist slurs in Russian in recent years. The most serious incident was recorded when the great synagogue of Petah Tikva was vandalised and desecrated with anti-Semitic slurs in May 2005.

The same month, military police arrested a soldier of Soviet origin who had a Nazi swastika tattooed on his arm and who said he hated Jews.

Shortly afterwards, another soldier was indicted for setting up the first neo-Nazi website in Israel, which included links to the text of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf and a photo of him and two other soldiers performing a Nazi salute in uniform. He was sentenced to 200 hours community service.

Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum, says that the anti-Semitism in Israel reflects "popular anti-Semitic stereotypes in Europe, especially Ukraine, which are very hard to counter."

The extremists shy away from talking to reporters -- repeated messages left at an Israeli Russian nationalist website, the "Russian Nationalist Centre," went unanswered.

But the website itself offers a glimpse into the world of anti-Semites who live, work and are citizens of the Jewish state.

Among its goals is to "accustom Russian people living in Israel to Russian national culture and awaken national consciousness," to prevent "any and all forms of Russian people converting to Judaism," to help Russians in Israel return to the motherland, and prevent "Jews from returning to Russia."

In statements posted on the website, the nationalists say they choose to live among the people they despise because their duty is to help fellow Russians get in touch with their roots.

"If we don't help them choose their destiny, what kind of nationalists are we?" says the site, vowing that "in any case sooner or later we'll all return to Russia."

Faced with this grim reality, Gilichenski believes that "here in Israel the phenomenon is much more dangerous because there are many targets and potential victims."

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Vigilantes impose peace in Rio slums

2007-08-05T23:14:00.001-07:00

For as long as anyone can remember, the cracked asphalt soccer field in the Roquete Pinto slum was off-limits to children — "reserved" by gangs selling marijuana and cocaine. Then, a few months ago, a mysterious squad of beefy men with submachine guns started patrolling on foot, and the drug dealers disappeared.

A few days ago, while gunbattles were raging in two other Rio de Janeiro neighborhoods and bystanders were shielding their kids from the bullets, the barefoot teens of Roquete Pinto smiled and shouted as they kicked a ball around their freshly liberated field.

Startling transformations like Roquete Pinto's are increasingly visible across Rio, as for-profit "militias" made up of active and former police officers, private security guards, off-duty prison guards and firefighters evict drug gangs from slums where violence used to be out of control.

Although some worry about the implications of vigilante justice, the militias have powerful sympathizers, among them Mayor Cesar Maia, who calls them "self-defense groups" and says that compared with the drug gangs, the vigilantes are the lesser evil.

The surprise is that the gangs aren't fighting to hold their turf. In the few known cases where they did, militia gunfire turned them back.

Critics say the city risks going the way of Colombia, where violent paramilitary groups that sprang up to battle guerrillas came to hold more power than authorities in some areas.

"It's the state that establishes law and order, not the militia," said Sergio Cabral, governor of Rio de Janeiro state. "We won't accept this under any conditions."

But President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva hasn't spoken out against the militias, and it seems that law enforcement has fallen into a gray area in many Rio slums, and city authorities may be content to leave it at that as Brazil prepares to host
Pope Benedict XVI next month and Rio stages the Pan American Games in July.

In this city of 6 million people, one of the world's most violent, "the police provide security for the rich" and "the militias are the security of the poor," said Marina Maggessi, a congresswoman and a former senior drug-control official. She has mixed feelings about the militias, saying they represent the "collapse of the state."

First gaining strength in 2003 as an alternative to ineffective, often corrupt police, the illegal security forces have mushroomed since late last year and now control about 90 of Rio's 600 "favelas," Maggessi said. Success in slums like Roquete Pinto, meanwhile, fuels their expansion into others.

"This place was dead," said Joao Batista dos Santos da Silva Jr., president of the Roquete Pinto residents' association. "It was war every day."

Like many slum community leaders, he refuses to acknowledge the existence of the militias, saying the cleanup is entirely the work of the police, even though there is no station in the slum, and not a single officer or patrol car was seen during two recent visits.

On the other hand, Roquete Pinto's new protectors were hard to miss: Seven big men in shorts and T-shirts, silently eating lunch in a pool hall, a submachine gun and automatic pistols on the table between their plates.

In another favela, Rio das Pedras, a woman selling shampoo on the street had no doubts. "There are no muggers and no drug sellers," said Margarida Rodrigues dos Santos, 57. "The militia won't let them in."

At Roquete Pinto's soccer field, the gangs "would come down here, shoot the place up and tell everyone to go home," said 19-year-old Rodrigo dos Santos.

Now the only reminders of the gangs are the bullet-pocked street lamps around the soccer field. Residents say robberies have become rare. Delivery trucks once barred from entering now drive through, and there's a new Internet cafe and a lively outdoor market.

There are no official estimates of how much money the militias make, but residents of one slum told the O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper that families pay $7-$14 per month. That adds up quickly in the steep hillsides where tens of thousands of families live.

Militia leaders did not respond to requests for interviews.

"They're very leery about reporters," said Jose Fontes, a member of a militia that took over the Kelson's slum last November. "The commander is in hiding and won't even answer his phone."

At least one high-ranking police officer has endorsed their work while acknowledging that they are illegal.

"The communities are now free from the traffickers," Col. Mario Sergio de Brito Duarte, who heads a special favela operations unit, said in an e-mail. "Children and teenagers living in these neighborhoods are no longer exposed to drug wholesaling."

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Hamas' Mickey Mouse: Teaching Kids to Hate and Kill

2007-08-05T23:13:00.001-07:00

Hamas TV has a new children's show which features a Mickey Mouse lookalike. But this Mickey does not romp about with Pluto, nor does he woo Minnie Mouse. Instead – he teaches his young viewers to fight the "Zionist Occupation" and dream of a world dominated by Islam.

The squeaky-voiced Mickey Mouse lookalike, named Farfur, is the star of a weekly children’s program called Tomorrow’s Pioneers on the official Hamas TV station (Al-Aqsa TV), which broadcasts from Gaza via satellite to the entire Arab world. Farfur and his co-host, a young girl named Saraa’, teach children about such things as the importance of the daily prayers and drinking milk, but also instruct them to hate Israel and the US and support "resistance" – a euphemism for terror.

Farfur tells children that they must pray in the mosque five times a day until there is “world leadership under Islamic leadership.” The earnest and soft-spoken Saraa’ explains that the nucleus of the Islamic leadership of the world will be from “all of Palestine,” including Israel. Farfur refers to Israel as “the oppressive invading Zionist occupation,” which the children must "resist."

Saraa’ announces that after death, the children will have to answer to Allah for what they did or did not do for the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and for Palestinian prisoners: “I remind you that Al-Aqsa and the prisoners are a responsibility on our shoulders, and Allah will ask us on Resurrection Day what we gave for their sake," she tells the tots viewing the show.

According to Palestinian Media Watch, "using a character based on an appealing, world-famous and beloved icon like Mickey Mouse to teach Islamic supremacy and resistance as Islamic duty is a powerful and effective way to indoctrinate children."

The program encourages participation by child viewers, who phone in to the show and recite poems with images of hate and violence; for example, “We will destroy the chair of the despots, so they will taste the flame of death,”
and, in another poem, "Rafah sings ‘Oh, oh.’ Its answer is an AK-47. We who do not know fear, we are the predators of the forest."

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The Perverse Demographic Effects of Europe's Welfare State

2007-08-05T23:09:00.000-07:00

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Last year more than 155,000 Germans emigrated from their native country. Since 2004 the number of ethnic Germans who leave each year is greater than the number of immigrants moving in. While the emigrants are highly motivated and well educated, "those coming in are mostly poor, untrained and hardly educated," says Stephanie Wahl of the German Institute for Economics.
In a survey conducted in 2005 among German university students, 52 percent said they would rather leave their native country than remain there. By "voting with their feet," young, educated Germans affirm that Germany has no future to offer them and their children. As one couple who moved to the United States told the newspaper Die Welt: "Here our children have a future in which they will not have to fear unemployment and social decline." There are two main reasons why so-called "ethno-Germans" emigrate. Some complain that the tax rates in Germany are so high that it is no longer worthwhile working for a living there. Others indicate they no longer feel at home in a country whose cultural appearance is changing dramatically.
The situation is similar in other countries in Western Europe. Since 2003, emigration has exceeded immigration to the Netherlands. In 2006, the Dutch saw more than 130,000 compatriots leave. The rise in Dutch emigration peaked after the assassinations of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh. This indicates that the flight from Europe is related to a loss of confidence in the future of nations which have taken in the Trojan horse of Islamism, but which, unlike the Trojans, lack the guts to fight.
Elsewhere in Western Europe immigration currently still surpasses emigration, though emigration figures are rising fast. In Belgium the number of emigrants surged by 15 percent in the past years. In Sweden, 50,000 people packed their bags last year -- a rise of 18 percent compared to the previous year and the highest number of Swedes leaving since 1892. In the United Kingdom, almost 200,000 British citizens move out every year.
Americans who think that the European welfare state is the model to follow would do well to ponder the question why, if Europe is so wonderful, Europeans are fleeing from it. European welfare systems are redistribution mechanisms, taking money from skilled and educated Europeans in order to give it to nonskilled newcomers from the Third World.
Gunnar Heinsohn, a German sociologist at the University of Bremen, warns European governments that they are mistaken if they assume that qualified young ethnic Europeans will stay in Europe. "The really qualified are leaving," Mr. Heinsohn says. "The only truly loyal towards France and Germany are those who are living off the welfare system, because there is no other place in the world that offers to pay for them... It is no wonder that young, hardworking people in France and Germany choose to emigrate," he explains. "It is not just that they have to support their own aging population. If we take 100 20-year-olds [in France or Germany], then the 70 [indigenous] Frenchmen and Germans also have to support 30 immigrants of their own age and their offspring. This creates dejection in the local population, particularly in France, Germany and the Netherlands. So they run away."
On Monday Francois Fillon, the new French prime minister, said that "Europe is not Eldorado," emphasizing that his government intends to curb immigration by those who only seek welfare benefits. "Europe is hospitable, France is an immigration country and will continue to be so, but it will only accept foreigners prepared to integrate," he stressed. Europe cannot afford to be "Eldorado" for foreigners any longer, because it has stopped being "home" for thousands of its own educated children, now eagerly looking for opportunities to move to America, Canada, Australia or New Zealand -- white European nations outside Europe.
While the fertility rate in France is 1.9 children per woman, two out of every five newborns in France are children of Arab or African immigrants. In Germany (fertility rate 1.37) 35 percent of all newborns have a non-German background. Paradoxically, fertility rates in Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, etc., are lower than among immigrants from these countries in Europe. "A woman in Tunisia has on average 1.7 children. In France she has six because the French government pays her to have them," Mr. Heinsohn explains. "Of course, the money was never intended to benefit Tunisian women in particular, but French women will not touch this money, whereas the Tunisian women are only too happy to... For Danish and German women the welfare benefits are too low to be attractive. Not so for the immigrants. So, what we see in England, France, Germany and the Netherlands are immigrant women who take low-paid jobs which they supplement with public benefits. It is not a fantastic income but sufficient for them," he said.
Europe's welfare system is causing a perverse process of population replacement. If the Europeans want to save their culture, they will have to slay the welfare state.

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Iraq, 'Sinking Fast,' Is Ranked No. 2 on List of Unstable States

2007-08-05T23:06:00.000-07:00

Iraq now ranks as the world's second most unstable country, ahead of war-ravaged or poverty-stricken nations such as Somalia, Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast, Congo, Afghanistan, Haiti and North Korea, according to the 2007 Failed States Index, issued yesterday by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine.

Despite billions of dollars in foreign aid and the presence of more than 150,000 U.S. troops, Iraq has declined steadily over the past three years, according to the index. It ranked fourth last year, but its score dropped in almost all of the 12 political, economic, security and social indicators on which the index is based.

"The report tells us that Iraq is sinking fast," said Fund for Peace President Pauline Baker. "We believe it's reached the point of no return. We have recommended -- based on studies done every six months since the U.S. invasion -- that the administration face up to the reality that the only choices for Iraq are how and how violently it will break up."

In a parallel series of reports, the Fund for Peace, a research and advocacy group, suggests a policy of managed partition for Iraq.

Sudan, largely because of the humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur, is the world's most unstable country, the group concluded. As many as 450,000 Sudanese have died, and an additional 2 million to 3 million have been displaced.

"There were only marginal differences between Iraq and Sudan, and Iraq is worse then Somalia, which is already a failed state," Baker said.

There are two driving forces behind Iraq's escalating problems, Baker said. The first is internal fragmentation, marked by the proliferation of militias and other groups that the United States and Iraqis have been unable to control. The second is interference by external forces in the country.

The organization reported that Africa is the continent with the most significant slide. Eight of the 10 most unstable countries are in Africa, the report concludes.

The other two are Iraq and Afghanistan, countries where the Bush administration has made enormous military and financial commitments since 2001. Their experiences show that billions of dollars in development and security aid may be futile unless accompanied by a functioning government and plans for peacekeeping and economic development, Foreign Policy reports in its July-August issue, in which the index is forthcoming.

Afghanistan ranked eighth, Haiti 11th, North Korea 13th and Burma 14th. Pakistan and North Korea, which have nuclear weapons, are among the 15 most unstable countries, according to the report.

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Up to three in four marriages revealed as 'sham' as immigration rules are tightened

2007-08-05T23:05:00.002-07:00

Three in every four register office weddings taking place in some parts of Britain may have been a "sham" to allow immigrants to live in the country, it has emerged

The scale of the scandal, which Labour ignored for many years, has been revealed for the first time by a huge reduction in the number of ceremonies taking place.

Since a belated crackdown was ordered in February 2005, the number of couples tying the knot in register offices has fallen by 72 per cent in the London borough of Newham, from 1,834 to 507.

Across the capital, unions fell by 36 per cent. The number of marriages, including those at churches, plunged by at least 10,000.

In Birmingham, register office weddings were down by 17 per cent, from 3,617 in 2004/5 to 3,013 last year.

Mark Rimmer, director of registration and nationality at Brent Council, who first raised the alarm about the sham marriage practice, said: "Most people will be absolutely amazed and gobsmacked by the scale of it."

He said that, even accounting for an overall 10 per cent fall in the number of marriages taking place in all venues last year, it suggests a quarter of weddings in London were bogus.

Registrars, including Mr Rimmer, began warning the Home Office of a huge increase in suspected bogus weddings around five years ago.

Gangs charge up to £10,000 to arrange sham weddings on behalf of migrants desperate to live here.

People with a right to live in Britain, often from other EU countries were paid up to £2,000 a time to take part in the sham weddings. Often, they did not even know their partner's full name or background.

By marrying, the migrant was allowed to remain in Britain and move freely around the EU.

But, despite clear evidence of abuse, it was only in February 2005 that weddings involving a person subject to immigration controls were made the subject of new rules.

Since that date, all migrants must to seek a Home Office Certificate of Approval before a ceremony can take place.

These are only given to those who already have leave to remain in Britain, albeit temporarily. Ceremonies must also take place at designated.

The crack down has since been watered down by the courts. In May this year, Mr Justice Buxton said asking migrants to prove their relationship was genuine breached their human right to marry, and to not be discriminated against.

He said the Home Office must no longer treat all weddings as suspicious, and could only act if there was evidence of a sham union. Ministers insisted it would not undermine the policy.

Immigration Minister Liam Byrne said: "Sham marriages are an abuse of the immigration rules and the certificate of approval process is an effective countermeasure.

"Since we introduced these checks, in February 2005, the number of suspicious marriage reports received from registrars has collapsed from 3,740 in 2004 to less than 300 by the end of May 2005, and between January and August 2006, there were only 149 such reports."

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Only one in six of UK's richest men is paying any income tax

2007-08-05T23:05:00.001-07:00

The super-rich are using loopholes to avoid paying £2billion a year in income tax, official figures have revealed.

Only one in six of those earning more than £10million a year is paying tax on their earnings - with the rest using loopholes to dodge the burden.

The revelation will fuel anger over the private equity tycoons who are making vast fortunes while the gap between rich and poor widens.

MPs condemned the Treasury figures as a 'national disgrace' and urged Gordon Brown to close the loopholes and help ordinary people instead.

Sir Ronald Cohen, one of Britain's richest men, has warned that rioting could erupt on the streets because of the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots.

Freedom of Information requests revealed that, of the more than 400 UK-based individuals who earn or are capable of earning more than £ 10million a year, only 65 filled in a tax return in 2004-05.

The remainder use sophisticated tax dodges to get round paying - including claiming non-resident or non-domicile status or diverting their earnings to offshore trusts.

One leading private equity tycoon has admitted that a tax break on share sales means he pays a lower rate of tax than his cleaner.

The loophole, known as taper relief, means wealthy businessmen pay as little as 10 per cent tax on the sale of shares - which is effectively their main source of income.

But the largest tax dodge is nondomicile status, which allows foreign billionaires to base themselves in Britain but pay no tax on their overseas earnings. In 2004-05, 112,000 individuals claimed non-domicile status.

British citizens can also escape tax if they spend no more than an average of 90 days a year in the country over four years.

Others slash their bills by holding their earnings in trusts in offshore tax havens such as the Channel Islands or British Virgin Islands.

A senior Tory yesterday came to the defence of the private equity bosses who were attacked by members of the Treasury select committee on Wednesday.

Trade spokesman Alan Duncan tore into the MPs on the committee for 'childish and undignified' behaviour in questioning the tycoons.

He added: 'The cocky behaviour of some of the members of the Select Committee yesterday was shameful and self-indulgent.'

But former Labour Minister Peter Kilfoyle said: 'This is a national disgrace. All power to the select committee for exposing this whole issue.

'The question is - What is the Government going to do about it? Are we going to have a new Chancellor who is going to make sure that these people are paying a fair proportion of tax like hardworking Britons have to do in any other occupation?'

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber added: 'It's time government stopped letting top earners off the hook of paying their fair share.'

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Lead exposure causes crime, economist says

2007-08-05T18:08:00.000-07:00

Rudy Giuliani never misses an opportunity to remind people about his track record in fighting crime as mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001.

"I began with the city that was the crime capital of America," Giuliani, now a candidate for president, recently told Fox's Chris Wallace. "When I left, it was the safest large city in America. I reduced homicides by 67 percent. I reduced overall crime by 57 percent."

While crime did fall dramatically in New York during Giuliani's tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to suggest the former mayor deserves only part of the credit that he claims. The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax, Va., who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the "New York miracle" was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce exposure to lead.

The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical explanation for fluctuations in the crime rate and is based on studies linking exposure to lead in children with violent behavior later in their lives.

What makes Nevin's work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

"It is stunning how strong the association is," Nevin said. "Sixty-five to 90 percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead."

Through much of the 20th century, lead in U.S. paint and gasoline fumes poisoned toddlers as they put contaminated hands in their mouths. The consequences on crime, Nevin found, occurred when poisoning victims became adolescents. Nevin does not say lead is the only factor behind crime, but he says it is the biggest factor.

Giuliani's presidential campaign declined to address Nevin's contention that the former mayor merely was at the right place at the right time. But William Bratton, who served as Giuliani's police commissioner and initiated many of the policing techniques credited with reducing the crime rate, dismissed Nevin's theory as absurd. Bratton and Giuliani instituted harsh measures against quality-of-life offenses, based on the theory that addressing minor offenses would head off more serious crimes.

Other theories

Many other theories have emerged to explain the crime decline. In the 2005 book "Freakonomics," Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner said the legalization of abortion in 1973 had eliminated "unwanted babies" who would have become violent criminals. Other experts credited lengthy prison terms for violent offenders, or demographic changes, socioeconomic factors, and the rise and fall of drug epidemics. New theories emerged as crime rates inched up in recent years.

Most of the theories have been long on intuition and short on evidence. Nevin's data attempt to explain both the decline in crime in the 1990s and also the rise in crime in the 1980s, as well as other fluctuations going back a century. His data from multiple countries, which have different abortion rates, police strategies, demographics and economic conditions, suggest lead is the only explanation that can account for international trends.

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Britain's 'out-of-control' teens the worst behaved in Europe

2007-08-05T17:59:00.000-07:00

British teenagers are the worst behaved in Europe, a report has revealed.

They are more likely to binge-drink, take drugs, have sex at a young age and start fights.

The report, from a think-tank closely linked to Labour, says the collapse of family life is at least partly to blame.

It means youngsters follow the example set by their friends rather than guidance from their parents.

The damning verdict from the Institute for Public Policy Research was revealed as ministers prepared to publish a blueprint aimed at keeping teenagers out of trouble. It is expected to include more cash for youth groups and other activities.

But the institute says radical measures are needed. It says many disruptive youngsters will simply ignore out-of-school activities unless forced to attend.

Its study found that 44 per cent of British youngsters had been involved in a physical fight in the previous year - against just 28 per cent in Germany, 36 per cent in France and 38 per cent in Italy.

Some 38 per cent confessed to under-age sex, almost double the French figure. The same percentage had tried cannabis, more than five times the rate in Sweden.

Our teenagers are also bigger drinkers, with 27 per cent admitting to getting drunk regularly. In Italy, the figure is five per cent and in France it is just three per cent.

The researchers found that UK children rarely talk in any depth to their parents or sit down to family meals.

Just 64 per cent ate a main meal with their parents several times a week, against 93 per cent in Italy.

They also spend more time 'hanging out' with other teenagers, meaning they learn how to behave from each other and are not taught 'how to get on in life'.

The IPPR also says British adults are becoming afraid of trying to curb out-of-control youngsters. We are less likely than our European counterparts to confront teenagers about antisocial behaviour and vandalism.

Ministers set the scene for the youth blueprint yesterday by announcing an outlay of almost £1.4billion on out-of-hours homework, art and drama clubs at primary and secondary schools.

The 'extended schools' initiative, where schools open ten hours a day, is aimed at helping latchkey children as well as encouraging more mothers back to work full-time.

But the IPPR wants 'a legal extension' to the school day to make pupils take part in afterschool activities such as martial arts and cadets groups, which have been credited with curbing anti-social behaviour.

Senior research fellow Julia Margo said: "Britain has a real problem with its teenagers. But it isn't their fault."

She said the Government's youth strategy, to be outlined to Parliament today, was an admission that teenagers had been left to their own devices for too long.

But she warned: "The worry is that if the Government is too touchy-feely and just offers teenagers the activities they say they want, we will fail another generation.

"Every child should be expected to do at least an hour a week of constructive after-school activities. They might not like it but the evidence shows that the ones who don't want to do it are the ones who would benefit the most."

The IPPR wants more pupils encouraged to follow pursuits such as Girl Guides and Scouts, Army, Air and Sea Cadets, martial arts, drama clubs and sporting teams.

The warning came as Schools Secretary Ed Balls said youngsters would be able to stay on at school in the evening as part of plans to keep all schools open between 8am and 6pm by 2010.

But despite the £1.38billion spending on the initiative, middle-class parents will still face charges for some extra provision.

The IPPR report adds to recent disturbing evidence that Britain is among the worst places to grow up in the developed world.

Unicef claimed earlier this year that British children were among the unhappiest and unhealthiest in Europe.

Ministers have disputed that report but acknowledge that more needs to be done to provide purposeful and constructive activities.

They plan a sharper focus on preventing anti-social behaviour before it becomes entrenched, with the cost to society that entails.

Premier Gordon Brown is keen to promote activities which encourage responsible citizenship, community service and volunteering and has already championed the spread of combined cadet forces to state schools.

Mr Balls is understood to want a 'good youth centre' in every neighbourhood.

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Autism gene breakthrough hailed

2007-08-05T17:57:00.000-07:00

Scientists have found new autism genes by scanning the largest collection of families with multiple cases of autism ever assembled.
The monumental task of studying the 1,200 families took more than 120 scientists from more than 50 institutions across 19 countries.

The work, described in Nature Genetics, implicates a region of chromosome 11and a specific gene called neurexin 1.

Experts say the findings should help with finding new autism treatments.

Autism is a complex brain disorder that inhibits a person's ability to communicate and develop social relationships, and is often accompanied by extreme behavioural challenges.

Scientists have long suspected that errors in a person's genetic blueprint play a part in autism.

Genetic code, DNA, is packaged in cells in the form of chromosomes, which are made up of strings of genes.

Experts have now located a region of one chromosome - 11p - and a gene called neurexin 1.

Neurexin belongs to a family of genes that help nerve cells communicate and the scientists now believe these play a critical role in autism spectrum disorders.

The work began five years ago in 2002, when scientists from around pooled their research resources and expertise and formed the Autism Genome Project.

They used "gene chip" technology to look for genetic similarities in autistic people, funded by the non-profit organisation Autism Speaks and the US National Institutes of Health.

Treatment need

Child psychiatrist Professor Jonathan Green, who led the clinical fieldwork in Manchester, said: "Autism is a very difficult condition for families - communication is taken for granted by parents of healthy children but is so greatly missed by those with autistic children.

"We hope that these exciting results may represent a step on the way to further new treatments in the future."

Professor John Burn, of the Institute of Human Genetics at Newcastle University, said the news was fantastic.

But he cautioned: "There will almost certainly be an interaction between several genes so this one discovery doesn't provide a complete answer and may not lead straight to a genetic test but it could be a key step in development for effective treatments as it provides a target for drug development."

Dr Fred Kavalier of the British Society for Human Genetics said a cure for autism was still a long way off.

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, said independent replication of the findings was now needed.

The next phase of the work, which will take three years and cost more than £7m, will hone in on the suspect areas of DNA.

It is estimated that autism and related disorders affect up to one in 100 British children.

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Crying Over Spilled Semen ( Why women who don't use condoms feel happier.)

2007-08-05T17:55:00.000-07:00

The finding that women who do not use condoms during sex are less depressed and less likely to attempt suicide than are women who have sex with condoms and women who are not sexually active, leads one researcher to conclude that semen contains powerful-and potentially addictive-mood-altering chemicals.

Study author Gordon G. Gallup, Ph.D., a psychologist at the State University of New York in Albany, also found that women who routinely had intercourse without condoms became increasingly depressed as more time elapsed since their last sexual encounter. There was no such correlation for women whose partners regularly used condoms.

Gallup's survey of 293 college women also found that those who did not use condoms were most likely to initiate sex and to seek out new partners as soon as a relationship ended. "These women are more vulnerable to the rebound effect, which suggests that there is a chemical dependency," says Gallup.

Semen contains hormones including testosterone, estrogen, prolactin, luteinizing hormone and prostaglandins, and some of these are absorbed through the walls of the vagina and are known to elevate mood.

Gallup controlled for variables including method of contraception, frequency of sexual intercourse, as well as the women's perception of their relationship. He concedes that women who regularly have sex without condoms might share personality traits that make them less susceptible to depression. But the behavior most often associated with non-condom users is sexual risk-taking, and studies have found no correlation between high-risk sexual behavior and lower rates of depression.

Gallup's study, which he deems "the first serious attempt to investigate the effect of semen chemistry on women," titillated the public and rankled some academics upon publication in Archives of Sexual Behavior. Gallup says he has since replicated the findings with a sample of 700 women and will examine whether "semen withdrawal" places women at an increased risk for depression when they are premenstrual, menopausal or have just given birth, as many women abstain from sex during these periods.

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Decreasing testosterone levels in men

2007-08-05T17:53:00.000-07:00

In one of the largest study of its kind, Travison et al. report a population-wide decline in Massachusetts's men’s testosterone levels during the last 20 years that is not related to normal aging or to health and lifestyle factors known to influence testosterone levels.

They found that testosterone concentrations dropped about 1.2% per year, or about 17% overall, from 1987 to 2004. The downward trend was seen in both the population and in individuals over time.

The decline is consistent with other long-term trends in male reproductive health, including decreases in sperm quality and increases in testicular cancer, hypospadias and cryptorchidism.

The strongest association was observed in same-aged men from different sampling years. For example, a 65-year-old in 2002 had lower testosterone levels than a 65-year-old in 1987.

Lower concentrations of testosterone can increase a man’s risk for age-related diseases, depression and infertility.

Also, the younger and older men in the study experienced similar hormone declines that dropped faster than would be predicted by normal aging.

Context: In men, the hormone testosterone guides behavior and reproduction. It controls growth and development of sex organs and other typically male characteristics, such as facial hair and a deep voice.

Normally, levels fluctuate from conception through puberty then level out during adulthood before declining as men age. Some chronic health problems typically seen in older adults, such as diabetes, depression and obesity, are associated with lower testosterone levels.

Recent studies have that found environmental impacts on testosterone levels. For example, testosterone levels were lower in US Air Force veterans exposed to dioxins while spraying Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, as well as in men exposed to phthalates at work.

What did they do?

Travison et al. used blood hormone data and personal information collected from men living in Boston, MA, as part of the Massachusetts Male Aging Study (MMAS). The MMAS examined men’s health and endocrine function. Data were gathered during three home visits from 1987-89 (T1), 1995-97 (T2), and 2002-04 (T3). Total testosterone (TT) and serum sex hormone-binding globulin were measured in the blood and available testosterone (BT) was calculated. The men self-reported such things as basic demographics, health status, and smoking and alcohol use.

In this study, Travison et al. analyzed data from 1,532 men (1,383, 955, and 568, respectively, from T1, T2 and T3) that met age and birth year requirements. Participants ranged from 45 to 79 years old and were born between 1916 and 1945. The researchers excluded high and low T levels, missing data, and unidentified prostate cancer treatment. Within the sample, they calculated and compared three separate but related associations among concentration, age, and time. They looked at changes in testosterone concentrations in the group of men at different years and ages associated with T1, T2, and T3; testosterone declines in individual men as they aged during the study; and testosterone concentrations of men of the same age but in different years (age-matched).

What did they find?

Travison et al. found strong evidence of a decline of more than 1% per year in men’s blood testosterone levels during the last two decades. The graph to the right shows average levels for each for men of different ages in each of the three measurement periods (T1-T3).

Dotted lines are 95% confidence bands. Adapted from Travison et al.

The first comparison to make is that within a cohort, older men tend to have lower testosterone levels. Compare, for example, 80 yr old men in T3 compared to 60 yr old men.

The crucial comparison to make is from one cohort to the next, comparing men of the same age. For example, 60 yr old men during the first measurement period (red line, 1987-1989) had total testosterone levels over 500 ng/dL. Men aged 60 yrs old in the third cohort (blue line, measured 2002-2004) had TT below 450 ng/dL. There is no overlap between the confidence bands of T1 vs T3: T3 (measured 2002-2004) is always lower than T1.

The trend holds regardless of the men’s age. Similar declines over the 17 years were seen in all ages of men in the study.

Travison et al. note that the decline within the cohorts related to age is less than the decrease observed across cohorts. For example, men aged 70 in T1 had TT only 6% less than men aged 45 in the same cohort. But 60 yr old men in T3 had TT concentration approximately 13% lower than men the same age in T1.

To illustrate this point another way, Travison et al. compared the average decline of testosterone levels in T1 vs T2 as a function of age, and then contrast that with differences in testosterone between men of the same age in T1 vs T2. Note that T1 and T2 were only separated by 9 years. The average declines in T1 and T2 per decade of life were 17 and 20 ng/mL, respectively. But 65 yr old men in T2 had total testosterone levels 50 ng/mL lower than those in T1, even though the samples were separated by less than a decade.

Travison et al. then estimated the decline over time, from the first cohort to the third, for men of the same age (what they called the age-matched decline). They found that testosterone declined by 1.2% per year (95% CI 1.0% to 1.4%).

Bioavailable testosterone (BT) also showed similar declines over time. The strongest associations again held for age-matched trends with declines of 1.3% per year (95% CI 1.7% - 1.1%).

None of the health and lifestyle factors examined were associated with either age-matched declines in either TT or BT: The age-matched declines remained essentially the same after controlling for chronic illness, general health, medications, smoking, body mass index, employment, marital status, and other indicators.

Finally, the trends held when analyzing the data in a number of different ways, including by interview date, study cohort, restricting to men of certain ages or birth cohorts, and considering incomplete versus complete data.

What does it mean?

Travison et al. find that testosterone levels declined in Massachusetts men by approximately 1.2% per year from the late 1980s through 2004, controlling for the age of the men and other possible confounding variables.

This study is important because of its large sample size and long duration. Few studies have looked directly at testosterone levels over time.

The results are surprisingly consistent with another set of long-term human epidemiology studies. Those studies also show a long-term decline in male reproductive functions, such as decreased sperm health and increased infertility, which are highly associated with or controlled by testosterone and other androgen hormones. The rate of decline reported in this study is roughly comparable to the rate of decline of sperm count reported first by Carlson et al. in 1992 and then reanalyzed by Swan et al.in 2000.

In commentary accompanying Travison et al.'s study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, Dr. Shalender Bhasin (Boston Medical Center) writes: The data in this study are "important because they provide independent support for the concerns raised earlier about the reproductive health of men." ... "it would be unwise to dismiss these reports as mere statistical aberrations because of the potential threat these trends-- if confirmed-- pose to the survival of the human race and other living residents of our planet."

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Exercise Grows New Brain Cells

2007-08-05T17:51:00.000-07:00

Exercise stimulates the growth of new brain cells, a new study on rats finds. The new cells could be the key to why working out relieves depression.

Previous research showed physical exercise can have antidepressant effects, but until now scientists didn’t fully understand how it worked.

Astrid Bjornebekk of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and her colleagues studied rats that had been genetically tweaked to show depressive behaviors, plus a second group of control rats. For 30 days, some of the rats had free access to running wheels and others did not.

Then, to figure out if running turned the down-and-out rats into happy campers, the scientists used a standard “swim test.” They measured the amount of time the rats spent immobile in the water and the time they spent swimming around in active mode. When depressed, rats spend most of the time not moving.

“In the depressed rats, running had an antidepressant-like effect after running for 30 days,” Bjornebekk told LiveScience. The once-slothful rodents spent much more time in active swimming compared with the non-running depressed rats.

The researchers also examined the hippocampus region of the brain, involved in learning and memory. Neurons there increased dramatically in the depressed rats after wheel-running.

Past studies have found that the human brain’s hippocampus shrinks in depressed individuals, a phenomenon thought to cause some of the mental problems often linked with depression.

“The hippocampus formation is one of the regions they have actually seen structural changes in depressed patients,” Bjornebekk said.

Running had a similar effect as common antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) on lifting depression.

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A New Golden Age of Medicine

2007-08-05T17:50:00.000-07:00

My dangerous idea is that we have in hand most of the information we need to facilitate a new golden age of medicine. And what we don't have in hand we can get fairly readily by wise investment in targeted research and intervention. In this golden age we should be able to prevent most debilitating diseases in developed and undeveloped countries within a relatively short period of time with much less money than is generally presumed. This is good news. Why is it dangerous?

One array of dangers arises because ideas that challenge the status quo threaten the livelihood of many. When the many are embedded in powerful places the threat can be stifling, especially when a lot of money and status are at stake. So it is within the arena of medical research and practice. Imagine what would happen if the big diseases — cancers, arteriosclerosis, stroke, diabetes — were largely prevented.

Big pharmas would become small because the demand for prescription drugs would drop. The prestige of physicians would drop because they would no longer be relied upon to prolong life. The burgeoning industry of biomedical research would shrink because governmental and private funding for this research would diminish. Also threatened would be scientists whose sense of self-worth is built upon the grant dollars they bring in for discovering miniscule parts of big puzzles. Scientists have been beneficiaries of the lack of progress in recent decades, which has caused leaders such as the past head of NIH, Harold Varmus, to declare that what is needed is more basic research. But basic research has not generated many great advancements in the prevention or cure of disease in recent decades.

The major exception is in the realm of infectious disease where many important advancements were generated from tiny slices of funding. The discovery that peptic ulcers are caused by infections that can be cured with antibiotics is one example. Another is the discovery that liver cancer can often be prevented by a vaccine against the hepatitis B virus or by screening blood for hepatitis B and C viruses.

The track record of the past few decades shows that these examples are not quirks. They are part of a trend that goes back over a century to the beginning of the germ theory itself. And the accumulating evidence supporting infectious causation of big bad diseases of modern society is following the same pattern that occurred for diseases that have been recently accepted as caused by infection.

The process of acceptance typically occurs over one or more decades and accords with Schopenhauer's generalization about the establishment of truth: it is first ridiculed, then violently opposed, and finally accepted as being self-evident. Just a few groups of pathogens seem to be big players: streptococci, Chlamydia, some bacteria of the oral cavity, hepatitis viruses, and herpes viruses. If the correlations between these pathogens and the big diseases of wealthy countries does in fact reflect infectious causation, effective vaccines against these pathogens could contribute in a big way to a new golden age of medicine that could rival the first half of the 20th century.

The transition to this golden age, however, requires two things: a shift in research effort to identifying the pathogens that cause the major diseases and development of effective interventions against them. The first would be easy to bring about by restructuring the priorities of NIH — where money goes, so go the researchers. The second requires mechanisms for putting in place programs that cannot be trusted to the free market for the same kinds of reasons that Adam Smith gave for national defense. The goals of the interventions do not mesh nicely with the profit motive of the free market. Vaccines, for example, are not very profitable.

Pharmas cannot make as much money by selling one vaccine per person to prevent a disease as they can selling a patented drug like Vioxx which will be administered day after day, year after year to treat symptoms of an illness that is never cured. And though liability issues are important for such symptomatic treatment, the pharmas can argue forcefully that drugs with nasty side effects provide some benefit even to those who suffer most from the side effects because the drugs are given not to prevent an illness but rather to people who already have an illness. This sort of defense is less convincing when the victim is a child who developed permanent brain damage from a rare complication of a vaccine that was given to protect them against a chronic illness that they might have acquired decades later.

Another part of this vision of a new golden age will be the ability to distinguish real threats from pseudo-threats. This ability will allow us to invest in policy and infrastructure that will protect people against real threats without squandering resources and destroying livelihoods in efforts to protect against pseudo-threats. Our present predicament on this front is far from this ideal.

Today experts on infectious diseases and institutions entrusted to protect and improve human health sound the alarm in response to each novel threat. The current fears over a devastating pandemic of bird flu is a case in point. Some of the loudest voices offer a simplistic argument: failing to prepare for the worst-case scenarios is irresponsible and dangerous. This criticism has been recently leveled at me and others who question expert proclamations, such as those from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control.

These proclamations inform us that H5N1 bird flu virus poses an imminent threat of an influenza pandemic similar to or even worse than the 1918 pandemic. I have decreased my popularity in such circles by suggesting that the threat of this scenario is essentially nonexistent. In brief I argue that the 1918 influenza viruses evolved their unique combination of high virulence and high transmissibility in the conditions at the Western Front of World War I.

By transporting contagious flu patients into a series of tightly packed groups of susceptible individuals, personnel fostered transmission from people who were completely immobilized by their illness. Such conditions must have favored the predator-like variants of the influenza virus; these variants would have a competitive edge because they could ruthlessly exploit a person for their own replication and still get transmitted to large numbers of susceptible individuals.

These conditions have not recurred in human populations since then and, accordingly, we have never had any outbreaks of influenza viruses that have been anywhere near as harmful as those that emerged at the Western Front. So long as we do not allow such conditions to occur again we have little to fear from a reevolution of such a predatory virus.

The fear of a 1918 style pandemic has fueled preparations by a government which, embarrassed by its failure to deal adequately with the damage from Katrina, seems determined to prepare for any perceived threat to save face. I would have no problem with the accusation of irresponsibility if preparations for a 1918 style pandemic were cost free. But they are not.

The $7 billion that the Bush administration is planning as a downpayment for pandemic preparedness has to come from somewhere. If money is spent to prepare for an imaginary pandemic, our progress could be impeded on other fronts that could lead to or have already established real improvements in public health.

Conclusions about responsibility or irresponsibility of this argument require that the threat from pandemic influenza be assessed relative to the damage that results from the procurement of the money from other sources. The only reliable evidence of the damage from pandemic influenza under normal circumstances is the experience of the two pandemics that have occurred since 1918, one in 1957 and the other in 1968. The mortality caused by these pandemics was one-tenth to one-hundredth the death toll from the 1918 pandemic.

We do need to be prepared for an influenza pandemic of the normal variety, just as we needed to be prepared for category 5 hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. If possible our preparations should allow us to stop an incipient pandemic before it materializes. In contrast with many of the most vocal experts I do not conclude that our surveillance efforts will be quickly overwhelmed by a highly transmissible descendent of the influenza virus that has generated the most recent fright (dubbed H5N1). The transition of the H5N1 virus to a pandemic virus would require evolutionary change.

The dialogue on this matter, however, continues to neglect the primary mechanism of the evolutionary change: natural selection. Instead it is claimed that H5N1 could mutate to become a full-fledged human virus that is both highly transmissible and highly lethal. Mutation provides only the variation on which natural selection acts. We must consider natural selection if we are to make meaningful assessments of the danger posed by the H5N1 virus.

The evolution of the 1918 virus was gradual, and both evidence and theory lead to the conclusion that any evolution of increased transmissibility of H5N1 from human to human will be gradual, as it was with SARS. With surveillance we can detect such changes in humans and intervene to stop further spread as was done with SARS. We do not need to trash the economy of southeast asia each year to accomplish this.

The dangerous vision of a golden age does not leave the poor countries behind. As I have discussed in my articles and books, we should be able to control much of the damage caused by the major killers in poor countries by infrastructural improvements that not only reduce the frequency of infection but also cause the infectious agents to evolve toward benignity.

This integrated approach offers the possibility to remodel our current efforts against the major killers — AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, dysentery and the like. We should be able to move from just holding ground to institution of the changes that created the freedom from acute infectious diseases that have been enjoyed by inhabitants of rich countries over the past century.

Dangerous indeed! Excellent solutions are often dangerous to the status quo because they they work. One measure of danger to some but success to the general population is the extent to which highly specialized researchers, physicians, and other health care workers will need to retrain, and the extent to which hospitals and pharmaceutical companies will need to downsize. That is what happens when we introduce excellent solutions to health problems. We need not be any more concerned about these difficulties than the loss of the iron lung industry and the retraining of polio therapists and researchers in the wake of the Salk vaccine.

LINK

Asian-American mental health

2007-08-05T17:49:00.000-07:00

The first national study of Asian-American mental health finds that the second generation is more likely than their immigrant parents to have emotional disorders.

Asian Americans are less likely to seek help for their emotional or mental health problems than whites, according to preliminary data from the National Latino and Asian American Study (NLAAS), conducted from May 2002 though December 2003–the first national study to examine the rates of mental illness and treatment use among a national sampling of three major Asian-American groups. The study, principally funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, interviewed 2,095 participants, consisting of large samples of Chinese, Filipino and Vietnamese–as well as other Asian Americans, including among others, Japanese, Koreans and Asian Indians. Past studies have examined these groups, but with limited samples, such as treatment studies, college student samples or regional community data.

NLAAS data show that, as a group, Asian Americans have lower rates of mental illness than whites but seek treatment less often. However, investigators are still at the early stages of analyzing the study's data, which are the first to tease out on a large scale the differences between the many cultural and ethnic Asian-American groups. Investigators are exploring the ways in which these differences, along with immigration status, birthplace and age, may affect the prevalence of mental health disorders and the likelihood of seeking and getting effective treatment.

For instance, while Vietnamese Americans had similar rates of mental illness as the other Asian-American groups, they were much more likely to seek help, preliminary study data indicate. NLAAS researchers think that the disparity may be due to the trauma that many Vietnamese immigrants experienced as refugees before coming to America. Also, Asian Americans who were born in the Unites States or who immigrated at a young age had higher rates of mental illness–possibly because they are more exposed to American peer networks and institutions than are adult immigrants. Although the NLAAS participants have many different cultural and religious beliefs, researchers found some common risk factors for mental health problems–particularly those involving family and social status.

Prejudice and mental health

Social status–both real and perceived–can be significant risk factor, according to NLAAS findings. For many, income level, profession and familial respect contribute to a sense of success.

"For Asian Americans, it isn't just objective social status, but their perception of their social status in society–those who see it as low have higher rates of disorders," says David Takeuchi, PhD, a principal investigator for NLAAS and a professor of sociology and social welfare and director of the Diversity Research Institute at the University of Washington.

The negative effects of social status can reach beyond dissatisfaction with social status, NLAAS researchers have found. Takeuchi and Soo Yun Uhm, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow with the APA Minority Fellowship Program at the University of Washington, studied the relationship between perceived unfair treatment and depression among NLAAS participants. Such treatment may include both specific events and a general sense of being disrespected that may or may not be linked to racism, says Uhm.

In the study they presented at APA's 2005 Annual Convention in Washington, D.C., Uhm and Takeuchi found that 74 percent of Asian-American NLAAS participants said they had experienced some kind of unfair treatment and 63 percent attributed such instances to racial factors. NLAAS researchers asked participants whether and how often they had experienced any of nine unfair events, such as "I was treated less courteously," or "people act as if they think you are not smart," or "you are threatened or harassed." Then researchers asked them to attribute the event to racial factors, such as ethnicity, race or skin color, or nonracial factors, such as gender, age, weight or education. This unfair treatment scale was adapted from a study that appeared in the Journal of Psychology (Vol. 2, No. 4, pages 335–351).

When Uhm and Takeuchi compared these responses with the NLAAS rates of major depression, they found that participants who experienced any one of the nine items were 9 percent more likely to have had major depression in the previous 12 months.

Although recent immigrants might be expected to experience more unfair treatment, they were actually less likely to perceive such events as unfair than second- or third-generation Asian Americans, the study found. Uhm speculates that recent immigrants may have encountered circumstances that make such treatment seem relatively unimportant, or they may expect different treatment because of their accents or limited English and unfamiliar customs.

In contrast, she notes, Asian Americans who grew up in the United States are more likely to identify strongly with the mainstream culture and thus may be more attuned to suggestions that challenge their rights and identity as Americans.

Family matters

When it comes to family life, the second generation's embrace of mainstream culture can lead to confusion or conflict in the family, points out Anna Lau, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles.

For example, immigrant parents expect their children to be obedient and perform well in school–a cultural norm that shows their appreciation of the sacrifices the family made by leaving their native country. However, children may reject this role in pursuit of independence and a place in the new culture. These changing dynamics lead to conflict between child and parent, which increases their risk for experiencing mental health problems.

Conflict can also lead to violence. Using NLAAS data, Lau has found in as-yet-unpublished research that over 30 percent of Asian-American parents reported minor parent-to-child assault, and 2 percent reported major assault. Both minor and major forms of violence further increase the risk of mental health problems–particularly for children.

"Families with issues over goals and family unity and priorities are more likely to report severe abuse," says Lau. And although statistically Asian Americans have lower rates of child abuse than other ethnic groups, Lau thinks abuse goes largely undetected because Asian Americans are reluctant to talk about personal issues and tend to deny family problems exist. In fact, reports Lau, parents from Asian cultures are often more likely to view the use of physical discipline as part of being an involved and concerned parent, and as a way to teach children duty. The children themselves may not even perceive it as abuse. However, even if children see such punitive measures as normal, studies have shown that they still show increased stress levels, says Lau.

Cultural stress

Cultural adjustment and changes in gender roles may also lead to domestic or interpersonal violence, which Asian Americans generally don't talk about or even acknowledge, says Doris Chang, PhD, a psychology professor at the New School for Social Research.

"I don't think recent immigrants see it as a huge problem in the community. It tends to be considered a private family issue," says Chang, adding that in certain Asian-American cultures, some degree of male-to-female violence–such as a man hitting his wife in certain circumstances–is considered normal.

Indeed, a distinct cultural clash is at the root of many domestic violence cases among recent immigrants, according to a study Chang conducted with Takeuchi and Biing J. Shen, PhD, and presented at the 4th Pan-Asian Pacific Conference on Mental Health in Shanghai, China. She says that even after taking into account traditional risk factors such as alcohol use and poverty, cultural conflicts related to individual versus "group" (family or couple) goals appear to increase the risk for intimate partner violence. Both spouses are trying to learn a new language and looking for work, upsetting traditional gender roles. For recent immigrants, simply the idea of the woman working can be a problem for both spouses. Suddenly, the wife is juggling working with maintaining a household and may try to negotiate a more egalitarian division of household labor. Chang says that struggles over household duties are closely tied to an increased risk of violence.

The data show that Asian Americans who are born in the United States have a higher risk of committing or being a victim of domestic violence. Chang is not sure why, but suspects that this group may become socialized to violence in ways that are similar to mainstream U.S. populations. Chang believes that friends and family may actively urge women to keep quiet. Language may also keep a woman silent–there may literally be no one to talk to, she says.

Getting help

Such barriers as language, culture and little access to care keep many Asian Americans from receiving help for mental illness.

In fact, Asian Americans as a group are unlikely to seek help for mental illness from any source, and when they do they report low levels of satisfaction, according to as-yet-unpublished research by Takeuchi and Jennifer Abe-Kim, PhD, an associate psychology professor at Loyola Marymount University. However, they found, when Asian Americans seek help from a mental health professional rather than a medical provider, the rates of satisfaction go up.

So how can the psychological community reach out to this group?

"Education," says Abe-Kim. "A lot of immigrants aren't aware of resources."

Working with medical providers is particularly important because they are usually the first or only professional seen by most immigrants and many U.S.-born Asian Americans with mental illnesses, says Abe-Kim, who stresses that interpretation services should be used whenever possible. Providers also need to be aware that many immigrants–especially those from isolated areas–have no idea what a psychologist is or what they do. Health professionals need to educate themselves about a patient's culture and how that might affect symptoms or treatment.

And, since many Asian Americans don't seek medical help, the public health and psychological communities need to be creative.

"Go where the people are," says Abe-Kim, whether that be schools, churches or community centers–wherever groups gather. For example, Cut It Out, a national program originally created by antidomestic violence groups in Alabama, is working to prevent domestic violence by reaching out to women in nail salons.

Takeuchi and Abe-Kim say many cultural and mental health issues still need to be examined. But, as for many minorities, the essential issue remains, in Takeuchi's words, "How do you fit into society? How do people from different racial and ethnic groups find a "place" or a sense of belonging in their neighborhoods, schools or workplaces?"

LINK

A hug a day keeps the doctor away

2007-08-05T17:46:00.000-07:00

"EVERYBODY NEEDS TOUCH, especially the elderly," says Beata Aleksandrowicz. "Very often they are alone, their partners have gone or have died or they're sick, and nobody is touching them." Aleksandrowicz, a massage therapist, is speaking about a project she launched last month that saw therapists across England give free hand massages to elderly people in nursing homes. The response was heartening. "I had reactions such as, 'Oh, I had no idea that I need touch so much' or 'Oh, it's like I'm in fairyland!' "

Bertrand Russell once wrote: "Not only our geometry and our physics, but our whole conception of what exists outside us is based upon the sense of touch." But our experience of touch is dwindling. Increasingly we live alone, have virtual friends, shy away from any kind of physical contact with strangers for fear it might be unhygienic or inappropriate or could become violent.

The effects of not touching can prove detrimental to our wellbeing, both as individuals and as a society. "When you touch or are touched, you get the feeling of being connected with yourself and with others," Aleksandrowicz says, placing one hand on my arm. "When I touch you, you feel my touch - so by my touch you feel that you exist and you can connect with me. It is a feeling of being important, of being taken care of."

A 1997 study into the amount of touching and aggression among adolescents looked at the behaviour of 40 teenagers in McDonald's outlets in Paris and Miami. It found American adolescents spent considerably less time stroking, kissing, hugging and leaning against their peers than their French counterparts did.

Interestingly, the Americans showed more self-touching, such as playing with rings on their fingers, wringing their hands, twirling hair, wrapping arms around themselves, cracking knuckles, biting their lips, and also behaviour that was more aggressive, verbally and physically, towards their peers.

These findings are worrying, particularly because research suggests an absence of touching and physical interaction during adolescence may result in violent behaviour in later life. Touch deprivation appears to lead to a depletion in norepinephrine and serotonin, which, with dop-amine, are neurotransmitters affecting mood. When levels of norepinephrine and serotonin fall, levels of dopamine are left uninhibited, leading to the impulsive, often aggressive, behaviour associated with high levels of dopamine. (Research also suggests that levels of norepinephrine and serotonin may be increased through touch.)

Even though we're isolating ourselves from it, humans crave physical touch. It is one of the reasons people keep pets, Aleksandrowicz believes. "Because they can touch them, they can exchange warmth with them."

In many ways it was her own yearning for touch that brought Aleksandrowicz to massage. "I had some problems with my second husband," she says. "We had a lot of problems with intimacy, we couldn't open up for each other, and our friend just gave us the advice to try to touch each other a lot and just see how it goes. And I was amazed how closed I was to touch. I could not receive touch - it made me panic."

Now she offers courses for couples (as well as encouraging parents to massage their children, so they grow up to find touch usual). "You suddenly see these men who open up so much," she says.

Aleksandrowicz recently returned from a trip to meet bushmen in the Kalahari. She expected them to have a much freer approach to physical interaction and was shocked to find that was not the case. "I was in the middle of Namibia, 40C, sitting on the sand, with people who I've never seen before, whose culture is 40,000 years old, and they were all asking about touch," she says.

She massaged everyone in the village, sometimes several times. The first to be massaged was the oldest woman in the village. "Suddenly there was silence, this whole village stopped what they were doing - they stopped talking and started to sing," Aleksandrowicz says. She believes that the political situation of the bushmen - landless, powerless, severed from their traditions and history - has led to this intense feeling of disconnection. "It was very interesting. All of them asked me to touch their chests, the most emotional part of the body and also responsible for the ego. They don't know who they are - they're lost."

Some would say that people in the West are also losing sight of who they are. We shy from touching each other but are obsessed with appearance. We would rather, for example, go under the surgeon's knife than accept our own bodies. "We are living in a materialistic time where if you don't see you don't have," Aleksandrowicz says. "So we have cars, we have high salaries, we have the right shape of our bottom ... But we stop believing that we have enormous potential inside us."

And what does Aleksandrowicz get from a career that involves touching people all day? "It's amazing," she says. "It is a communication on the most basic, fundamental level, where there are no words or judgement or ego. It's just the purest possible interaction between two people."

LINK

Afternoon nap 'is good for heart'

2007-08-05T17:44:00.000-07:00

Taking 40 winks in the middle of the day may reduce the risk of death from heart disease, particularly in young healthy men, say researchers.

A six-year Greek study found that those who took a 30-minute siesta at least three times a week had a 37% lower risk of heart-related death.

The researchers took into account ill health, age, and whether people were physically active.

Experts said napping might help people to relax, reducing their stress levels.

It is known that countries where siestas are common tend to have lower levels of heart disease, but studies have shown mixed results.

The researchers in the Greek study looked at 23,681 men and women aged between 20 and 86. The subjects did not have a history of heart disease or any other severe condition.

Participants were also asked if they took midday naps and how often, and were asked about dietary habits and physical activity.

The researchers found those who took naps of any frequency and duration had a 34% lower risk of dying from heart disease than those who did not take midday naps.

Those who took naps of more than 30 minutes three or more times a week had a 37% lower risk.

Working men

Among working men who took midday naps, there was a 64% reduced risk of death compared with a 36% reduced risk among non-working men.

There were not enough female deaths to compare figures.

The researchers said taking a siesta may reduce stress, hence the more notable finding in working men.

Lead researcher Dr Dimitrios Trichopoulos, from the Harvard School of Public Health, said: "In countries where mortality from coronary diseases is low, siesta is quite prevalent.

"There have been other studies but with equivocal results.

"This study has four advantages - it's large, prospective, limited to healthy people and we have been very careful to control for physical activity.

"The thing we can say is that it's worth studying further."

He added that if backed by other trials, taking a siesta would be an interesting way of reducing heart disease as it had no side effects.

The only important factor was that people should not reduce the amount of physical activity they did in the rest of the day.

June Davison, cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said: "These interesting findings identify that having a siesta is associated with a reduced risk of dying from a heart problem, particularly in working men.

"Having a nap in the middle of the day may help people to unwind and relax - which is important for our overall health.

"However it is important to get a balance between rest and activity, as being regularly active can help reduce the risk of coronary heart disease."

She added that people who felt stressed might be more tempted to have less healthy behaviour, such as smoking, eating a poor diet, drinking too much alcohol and not getting enough exercise. This would add to their risk of suffering a heart-related death.

LINK

Every US Political Leader on Every Issue

2007-08-05T17:42:00.000-07:00

Every US Political Leader on Every Issue

The hardship of emigration in photos [Galicia] Manuel Ferrol

2007-08-05T17:29:00.000-07:00

The hardship of emigration in photos [Galicia] Manuel Ferrol

Dogs and selective breeding problems

2007-08-05T17:25:00.001-07:00

In the same way that inbreeding among human populations can increase the frequency of normally rare genes that cause diseases, the selective breeding that created the hundreds of modern dog breeds has put purebred dogs at risk for a large number of health problems, affecting both body and behavior.

Some conditions are directly related to the features breeders have sought to perpetuate among their dogs. As they deliberately manipulated the appearance of dogs to create or accentuate physical characteristics that were considered aesthetically pleasing, like the flat face of a bulldog or low-slung eyelids of a Bloodhound, breeders also created physical disabilities. The excessively wrinkled skin of the Chinese Shar-Pei causes frequent skin infection; Bulldogs and other flat-faced (or brachycephalic) breeds such as the Pekingese have breathing problems because of their set-back noses and shortened air passages; Bloodhounds suffer chronic eye irritation and infection.

The unnaturally large and small sizes of other breeds encourage different problems. For example, toy and miniature breeds often suffer from dislocating kneecaps and heart problems are more common among small dogs. Giant dogs such as Mastiffs, Saint Bernards, and Great Danes are nearly too big for their own good. Researchers have found a striking correlation between a dog's large size and a frequency of orthopedic problems like hip dysplasia. Large dogs are often prone to heat prostration because they can't cool down their bodies (tiny dogs, by contrast, have a hard time staying warm), and because of the massive weight they must support, these breeds are prone to malignant bone tumors in their legs. Meanwhile, the huge head and narrow hips of the Bulldog can necessitate that their pups must be born by Caesarean section.

Other health problems among purebreds are the product of both inbreeding and bad genetic luck. The genes responsible for many genetic diseases are "recessive," which means that two copies of a damaged gene, one from the mother and one from the father, must be present in an individual for the disease to occur. Individuals that carry only one copy of the disease gene don't have the condition, and are carriers of the disease. Normally, because disease genes are relatively rare, it is unlikely that both the mother and the father will be carriers, and even less likely that they'll both give the disease gene to their offspring. But that's not the case for purebred dog breeds, where genetically similar individuals are intentionally mated, increasing the concentration of disease genes. It's like stacking a deck of cards with ten extra aces and ten extra face cards; the loaded deck increases your chance of hitting blackjack in a game of 21-but what you "win" might be allergies or a predisposition to cancer.

Skin problems
A skin allergy, atopic dermatitis, inflicts itchy, inflamed skin on as many as 15 percent of all dogs, but certain breeds are particularly susceptible. Dog breeds prone to atopic dermatitis include Dalmatians, Vizslas, and several terriers, such as the Boston Terrier, Bull Terrier, and the West Highland White Terrier. The numerous skin folds of a Chinese Shar-Pei, so valued by some breeders, can become breeding grounds for staphylococcus and other bacteria, which cause frequent skin infections. Also, excess wrinkles of skin on the face can rub on the eye, causing lesions and, potentially, blindness.

Immune system disease
In autoimmune disorders, an individual's immune system, which normally works to fight off foreign invaders, launches a misguided attack against its own tissues and cells. A number of inherited diseases compromising the immune system have been noted in dogs, including primary severe combined immunodeficiency (a dog version of the "bubble boy" disease) among Basset hounds, Cardigan Welsh Corgis, and Dachshunds. Addison's disease, an autoimmune disease that affects the hormone-producing adrenal glands, occurs more frequently among several particular breeds, including the Bearded Collie, Portuguese Water Dog, and Standard Poodles. Diabetes mellitus, an autoimmune disorder affecting the body's response to sugars, shows up more frequently among Samoyeds and Australian Terrier dogs.

Blood disorders
Bassett Hounds are prone to an inherited abnormality the effects the ability of the platelets in the blood to clump together after an injury. The blood doesn't clot properly, leading to hemorrhage and bruising. Clotting problems also plague dogs with von Willebrand's disease, a genetic condition frequent in Doberman Pinschers.

Neurological, behavioral, and sensory
Neurological and behavioral problems afflict many pure breeds. Bull Terriers, for example, often compulsively chase their tails. Pugs are be predisposed to Pug Dog encephalitis, a fatal brain disease. Scottish Terriers are affected by Scottie Cramp, a disorder that causes the dogs to lose muscle control when they get excited. German Shepherds may inherit degenerative myelopathy, a crippling spinal cord disease that causes weakness and eventually paralysis.

Hearing and vision
Hereditary hearing loss is common in Dalmatians, Australian Cattle Dogs, and English Setters. Alaskan Malamutes, Siberian Huskies, Samoyeds, Bichon Frise, and more than 60 other purebred dogs suffer from inherited forms of cataracts, while progressive retinal atrophy, a common cause of blindness in purebreds, is particularly a problem in Old English Sheepdogs and Papillons.

Heart disease
Sudden death from cardiac disease is recurrent in several dog breeds, including Doberman Pinschers, Great Danes, Irish Wolfhounds, and German Shepherds. Boxers can be genetically predisposed to an irregular heartbeat. High blood pressure afflicts many small breeds including Poodles, Cocker Spaniels, Staffordshire terriers, among others.

Other organs and systems
Low thyroid function crops up most frequently in Alaskan Malamutes, English Setters, Golden Retrievers, Keeshonds, Samoyeds, and Siberian Huskies. Gastric torsion, or bloat, a potentially life-threatening inability to expel gas from the digestive system, is common among deep-chested breeds such as the Great Dane, Doberman, and German Shepherd. An inherited form of kidney disease affects English Cocker Spaniels, while Dalmatians are prone to kidney stones and Basenjis suffer from Fanconi Syndrome, a potentially fatal inherited disease in which the kidneys fail to reabsorb nutrients. Liver damage and cirrhosis are common in Bedlington Terriers because of an inherited condition called copper toxicosis, in which high levels of copper accumulate in the liver.

Cancer
Cancers are strongly influenced by genetics, and so it is not surprising to find various types of cancer among different dog breeds. For example, bone cancer, or osteosarcoma, is considerably more frequent among large and giant breeds of dogs, such as the Irish Wolfhound, Great Dane, Rottweiler, Labrador and Golden Retriever, Greyhound, and Saint Bernard, because their bones are stressed by carrying so much weight. High rates of malignant blood vessel tumors are seen among Golden Retrievers, which are also prone to leukemia and brain tumors. German Shepherd Dogs and Chow Chows are predisposed to gastric cancer, while Scottish Terriers are 18 times more likely to develop bladder cancer than are other breeds.

Orthopedic
Hip dysplasia, in which looseness in the hip joint causes excessive wear that eventually leads to arthritis, is most common among large dogs, especially those like the German Shepherd Dog and the Saint Bernard which have heavy, broad hips. The long neck and large head of breeds such as the Great Dane and the Doberman can cause the compression of the spinal cord in neck vertebrae, leading to wobbling and falling ("wobbler syndrome"). Selective breeding of the disproportionately short legs of breeds such as the Basset Hound and the Dachshund has led to bowed legs and chronic problems with elbow dislocation; the short legs and long back of Dachshunds causes them to suffer more often from ruptured vertebral disks. Because of their small bones, toy and miniature breeds are more likely to experience patellar luxation, the slipping or dislocation of the kneecaps.

LINK

Battle at Kruger

2007-08-05T17:24:00.001-07:00

Footage of the last "Tasmanian tiger"

2007-08-05T17:23:00.001-07:00

Promiscuity: why slutting around is good for the species

2007-08-05T17:21:00.002-07:00

There's a funny line in the Toni Collette movie Little Miss Sunshine in which the grandfather character, played by Alan Arkin (Yossarian from Catch 22 for movie buffs) gives his grandson Dwayne the benefit of his questionable wisdom.

They're sitting in the back of the family van, 15-year-old Dwayne looking as bored as a conscious human being can, when Arkin gives him the gold.

"Listen to me kid, I got no reason to lie to you," he says. "Don't make the same mistakes I made when I was young. F--- a lotta women, kid, not just one woman, a lotta women."

Needless to say, I had a huge laugh in the cinema when I heard this line because it's exactly what I'll be telling my son, and my daughter ...

As I've discussed in other posts there used to be serious political and religious reasons for keeping men and women monogamous while every one of a man's instincts cried out for the opposite.

No doubt you've heard it argued that, while men sharing it around helps them genetically by spreading their DNA far and wide, it's bad news for women, because it means her protector and provider might be lured to protect and provide for someone who's a better shag.

Aside from this, promiscuity and its ugly cousin, adultery, can cause all sorts of problems for humans: broken hearts, shattered marriages, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and bad country and western music.

What I want to know is, if promiscuity is such a bad thing, why has this behaviour not been bred out of us over millennia through natural selection?

If remaining monogamous was truly an evolutionary plus, why are we not seeing a higher variant of humanity for whom rooting around is not an issue; because when they mate, they imprint on each other so profoundly that they cease to find alternative mates sexually exciting?

Some animals (penguins, swans, mallard ducks) have managed this evolutionary leap, so why are we dragging the chain?

Perhaps the answer is because "slutting" around is actually good for the species.

In a 2002 article that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, writer Sally Lehrman reported that some anthropologists now argue that "female promiscuity binds communities closer together and improves the gene pool".

Quoting Pennsylvania anthropologist, Stephen Beckerman, she wrote that "more than 20 tribal societies accept the principle that a child could, and ideally ought to, have more than one father."

"As one looks, it begins to crop up in a lot of places," she quotes Beckerman, who in his work has "reviewed dozens of reports on tribes from South America, New Guinea, Polynesia and India as co-editor of the book Cultures of Multiple Fathers.

"Less than 50 years ago, Canela women, who live in Amazonian Brazil, enjoyed the delights of as many as 40 men one after another in festive rituals. When it was time to have a child, they'd select their favorite dozen or so lovers to help their husband with the all-important task," says Lehrman.

"Even today, when the dalliances of married Bari ladies in Columbia and Venezuela result in a child, they proudly announce the long list of probable fathers."

Other anthropologists argue that women instinctively want to capture maximum genetic variation in their offspring, to help their kids survive the challenges of evolving environmental threats, such as diseases and bad eccies.

So while it makes sense for a woman to have most of her children with one stable protector and provider, it makes greater evolutionary sense to slip another child into the mix, by another father who has exhibited good genes; is hot-looking, smart or can kick a football really far or displayed other, socially-predicated signs of desirability such as wealth or having his own network game show.

I guess, the greater question is where does all this instinct leave us in a world where so many sexual acts are rendered evolutionarily moot by contraception? Are our instincts still catching up to the condom and the pill?

Personally, I don't think that promiscuity is the danger that many portray it to be, when practised safely; it teaches people what they do and don't like in the bedroom which, according to 135,893,674 magazines, is the best way to judge whether your relationship's doing well.

It's also fun, perfectly natural, and ensures you don't have lingering "what ifs" when it does come time to hang up the boots, and that's why I'll be telling my kids to try before they buy.

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Almost Everyone Lies, Often Seeing It as a Kindness

2007-08-05T17:21:00.001-07:00

The perjury trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby goes to the jury this week. The case speaks to several issues -- how the Bush administration deals with critics of the war in Iraq, and the games that Washington's reporters and politicians play with each other. As far as the jury is concerned, however, the case is about only one thing: lying.

One particularly well-qualified witness on this subject was not called by either the prosecution or the defense, so today we cross-examine Robert Feldman ourselves. Feldman is a social psychologist at the University of Massachusetts who studies lying in everyday life, and his findings are just the kind of thing that Libby's lawyers could have pounced on.

Feldman's experiments show that stern-faced judicial proceedings about perjury are as remote from the realities of human behavior as President Bush is from the Nobel Peace Prize. For one thing, lying plays a more complex role in human relationships than the black-and-white legal view recognizes. It is also so commonplace in everyday life that putting people on trial for lying is somewhat like putting them on trial for breathing.

Experiments have found that ordinary people tell about two lies every 10 minutes, with some people getting in as many as a dozen falsehoods in that period. More interestingly -- and Libby might see this as the silver lining if he is found guilty -- Feldman also found that liars tend to be more popular than honest people. (Ever notice how popular politicians somehow change their minds on controversial issues such as the war in Iraq at the exact moment that public opinion on those issues changes?)

"It is not that lying makes you popular, but knowing when to say something and not be completely blunt is in fact a social skill," Feldman said. "We don't want to hear hurtful things, so a person who is totally honest may not be as popular as someone who lies. This is not to say lying is a good thing, but it is the way the social world operates."

Lying turns out to be one of those issues on which Americans simultaneously hold contrary points of view. On the one hand, the nation admires such icons as George "Cannot Tell a Lie" Washington and Abraham "Honest Abe" Lincoln. But Americans are an extremely sociable and gregarious people, and if the psychological experiments are accurate, being socially skillful almost always involves the ability and willingness to deceive.

"Parents venerate Washington and Lincoln but also tell their children there are instances you should not be honest: 'Tell your grandmother you like the gift even though you really don't,' " Feldman said. "Kids learn two messages: 'Always tell the truth,' and the other is, 'Not really.' "

Now most of the lies that Feldman is talking about do not involve national security and stakes as high as war. They are mostly designed to please others -- "It doesn't look like a toupee at all," "The muffins were great," "What an adorable baby!" -- and as harmless bouts of self-promotion, as in, "Yeah, I used play lead guitar for the Police," and, "Nelson Mandela was telling me the other day . . . ."

But before you get all high and mighty about how your lies never got anyone killed, consider this. A lot of research shows that serious lies are almost always told with the best of intentions. Think of it this way: Everyone would agree that telling a Nazi knocking at your door that you are not harboring Jews is a lie worth telling -- a heroic, necessary lie. What is harder to understand is that many people who lie for what we feel are contemptible reasons see themselves in the same heroic light.

"Look at the Libby trial," said Leonard Saxe, a social psychologist at Brandeis University. "Even if he knew when he testified that he was being deceptive, I am sure he believes he was doing it for the best of reasons and this was his way of being a patriot."

Saxe found in one experiment that nearly 85 percent of college students had lied in the course of a romantic relationship, most often about another relationship. (These were lies that people voluntarily admitted to Saxe, which means the actual number of lies and liars was probably higher.) Nearly to a person, the liars said they were trying to protect the feelings of someone they cared about.

Our reaction to such protestations is to roll our eyes, but life provides us with endless situations in which honesty is not the only virtue in play. Nor is it clear that most of us can really stand endless doses of honesty -- especially when the truth might hurt.

"We want everyone to be honest, but it is not clear what to do when honesty bumps up against other values -- caring about another person, their feelings," said Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "People say they want to hear the truth, but that is in the abstract. Would you tell someone, 'Tell me all the things about me you don't like, all the things that annoy you'?"

DePaulo once conducted a study in which she asked people to recall the worst lie they had ever told and the worst lie ever told to them. In a reflection of how much our perceptions of lying depend on our particular points of view, the psychologist found that many young people reported that the worst lie ever told to them was by a parent who concealed news that someone they loved was sick or dying. By contrast, DePaulo found, parents never thought of such deceptions as particularly serious ethical breaches -- in fact, they saw them as acts of love.

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IQ and US States

2007-08-05T17:14:00.001-07:00

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Finding Hope in Knowing the Universal Capacity for Evil

2007-08-05T17:11:00.001-07:00

At Philip G. Zimbardo’s town house here, the walls are covered with masks from Indonesia, Africa and the Pacific Northwest.

His Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, known as the S.P.E. in social science textbooks, showed how anonymity, conformity and boredom can be used to induce sadistic behavior in otherwise wholesome students. More recently, Dr. Zimbardo, 74, has been studying how policy decisions and individual choices led to abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The road that took him from Stanford to Abu Ghraib is described in his new book, “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil” (Random House).

“I’ve always been curious about the psychology of the person behind the mask,” Dr. Zimbardo said as he displayed his collection. “When someone is anonymous, it opens the door to all kinds of antisocial behavior, as seen by the Ku Klux Klan.”

Q. For those who never studied it in their freshman psychology class, can you describe the Stanford Prison Experiment?

A. In the summer of 1971, we set up a mock prison on the Stanford University campus. We took 23 volunteers and randomly divided them into two groups. These were normal young men, students. We asked them to act as “prisoners” and “guards” might in a prison environment. The experiment was to run for two weeks.

By the end of the first day, nothing much was happening. But on the second day, there was a prisoner rebellion. The guards came to me: “What do we do?”

“It’s your prison,” I said, warning them against physical violence. The guards then quickly moved to psychological punishment, though there was physical abuse, too.

In the ensuing days, the guards became ever more sadistic, denying the prisoners food, water and sleep, shooting them with fire-extinguisher spray, throwing their blankets into dirt, stripping them naked and dragging rebels across the yard.

How bad did it get? The guards ordered the prisoners to simulate sodomy. Why? Because the guards were bored. Boredom is a powerful motive for evil. I have no idea how much worse things might have gotten.

Q. Why did you pull the plug on the experiment?

A. On the fifth night, my former graduate student Christina Maslach came by. She witnessed the guards putting bags over the prisoners’ heads, chain their legs and march them around. Chris ran out in tears. “I’m not sure I want to have anything more to do with you, if this is the sort of person you are,” she said. “It’s terrible what you’re doing to those boys.” I thought, “Oh my God, she’s right.”

Q. What’s the difference between your study and the ones performed at Yale in 1961? There, social psychologist Stanley Milgram ordered his subjects to give what they thought were painful and possibly lethal shocks to complete strangers. Most complied.

A. In a lot of ways, the studies are bookends in our understanding of evil. Milgram quantified the small steps that people take when they do evil. He showed that an authority can command people to do things they believe they’d never do. I wanted to take that further. Milgram’s study only looked at one aspect of behavior, obedience to authority, in short 50-minute takes. The S.P.E., because it was slated to go for two weeks, was almost like a forerunner of reality television. You could see behavior unfolding hour by hour, day by day.

Here’s something that’s sort of funny. The first time I spoke publicly about the S.P.E., Stanley Milgram told me: “Your study is going to take all the ethical heat off of my back. People are now going to say yours is the most unethical study ever, and not mine.”

Q. From your book, I sense you feel some lingering guilt about organizing “the most unethical study” ever. Do you?

A. When I look back on it, I think, “Why didn’t you stop the cruelty earlier?” To stand back was contrary to my upbringing and nature.

When I stood back as a noninterfering experimental scientist, I was, in a sense, as drawn into the power of the situation as any prisoners and guards.

Q. What was your reaction when you first saw those photographs from Abu Ghraib?

A. I was shocked. But not surprised. I immediately flashed on similar pictures from the S.P.E. What particularly bothered me was that the Pentagon blamed the whole thing on a “few bad apples.” I knew from our experiment, if you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples.

That was why I was willing to be an expert witness for Sgt. Chip Frederick, who was ultimately sentenced to eight years for his role at Abu Ghraib. Frederick was the Army reservist who was put in charge of the night shift at Tier 1A, where detainees were abused. Frederick said, up front, “What I did was wrong, and I don’t understand why I did it.”

Q. Do you understand?

A. Yeah. The situation totally corrupted him. When his reserve unit was first assigned to guard Abu Ghraib, Frederick was exactly like one of our nice young men in the S.P.E. Three months later, he was exactly like one of our worst guards.

Q. Aren’t you absolving Sergeant Frederick of personal responsibility for his actions?

A. You had the C.I.A., civilian interrogators, military intelligence saying to the Army reservists, “Soften these detainees up for interrogation.”

Those kinds of vague orders were the equivalent of my saying to the S.P.E. guards, “It’s your prison.” At Abu Ghraib, you didn’t have higher-ups saying, “You must do these terrible things.” The authorities, I believe, created an environment that gave guards permission to become abusive — plus one that gave them plausible deniability.

Chip worked 40 days without a single break, 12-hour shifts. The place was overcrowded, filthy, dangerous, under constant bombardment. All of that will distort judgment, moral reasoning. The bottom line: If you’re going to have a secret interrogation center in the middle of a war zone, this is going to happen.

Q. You keep using this phrase “the situation” to describe the underlying cause of wrongdoing. What do you mean?

A. That human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside. The “situation” is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training. There are times when external circumstances can overwhelm us, and we do things we never thought. If you’re not aware that this can happen, you can be seduced by evil. We need inoculations against our own potential for evil. We have to acknowledge it. Then we can change it.

Q. So you disagree with Anne Frank, who wrote in her diary, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart?”

A. That’s not true. Some people can be made into monsters. And the people who abused, and killed her, were.

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DNA Tests Offer Immigrants Hope or Despair

2007-08-05T17:08:00.001-07:00

For 14 years, Isaac Owusu’s faraway boys have tugged at his heart. They sent report cards from his hometown in Ghana and painstaking letters in fledgling English while he scrimped and saved to bring them here one day.

Letters from boys in Ghana whom Isaac Owusu considers his. He will petition as a stepfather since tests showed three are not related to him.
So when he became an American citizen and officials suggested taking a DNA test to prove his relationship to his four sons, he embraced the notion. Imagine, he marveled as a lab technician rubbed the inside of his cheek, a tiny swab of cotton would reunite his family.

But modern-day science often unearths secrets long buried. When the DNA results landed on Isaac Owusu’s dinner table here last year, they showed that only one of the four boys — the oldest — was his biological child.

Federal officials are increasingly turning to genetic testing to verify the biological bonds between new citizens and the overseas relatives they hope to bring here, particularly those from war-torn or developing countries where identity documents can be scarce or doctored.

But while the tests often lead to joyful reunions among immigrant families, they are forcing others to confront unexpected and sometimes unbearable truths.

For Isaac Owusu, a widower, the revelation has forced him to rethink nearly everything he had taken for granted about his life and his family.

It has left him struggling to accept what was once unthinkable: that his deceased wife had long been unfaithful; that the children he loves are not his own; and that his long efforts to reunite his family in this country may have been in vain.

The State Department let his oldest son, now 23, come to the United States last fall, but said the others — a 19-year-old and 17-year-old twins — could not come because they are not biologically related to him.

Isaac Owusu, who asked that only his first and middle names be published because he would like to keep his family’s pain private, is still hoping the government will allow the teenagers to join him, arguing that he has been a devoted stepfather, if not a biological parent.

But in recent months, he says, he has simply unraveled.

“Sometime when I get in bed, I don’t sleep,” said Isaac Owusu, 51, who works for an electrical equipment distributor and an auto supply shop.

“I say to myself, ‘Why this one happen to me?’ ” he asked, his eyes wet with tears. “Oh, mighty God, why this one happen to me?”

A similar sense of shock is reverberating through other families across the country as genetic testing becomes more common. State Department and Homeland Security Department officials do not keep statistics on the number of DNA tests taken by new citizens or permanent residents, who are allowed to bring some close relatives to the United States if they can document their family ties.

But Mary K. Mount, a DNA testing expert for the A.A.B.B. — formerly known as the American Association of Blood Banks — estimates that about 75,000 of the 390,000 DNA cases that involved families in 2004 were immigration cases. Of those, she estimates, 15 percent to 20 percent do not produce a match.

Negative results can suggest an effort to bring in illegal immigrants or distant relatives, officials say, though they note that requests for DNA tests deter illicit activities. An official, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the cases, found no indication of wrongdoing by the families interviewed for this article.

Such genuinely unexpected results hit immigrant families particularly hard because DNA testing sometimes provides the best chance of reuniting with loved ones abroad.

“Sometimes these are complicated families,” said Tony Edson, a deputy assistant secretary of state. “People are learning things that they never knew about themselves.”

In California, for example, a Mexican-American family splintered after a DNA test showed that a young woman, a new citizen, was not related to the man she considered her father. The man, who was living in the United States, was ordered back to Mexico because his visitor’s visa had expired.

In Maryland, a man from Sierra Leone discovered that his baby back home was the product of a hidden trauma. His wife, who was separated from him during their country’s civil war, had been raped by rebels. In her shame, she had never revealed the truth.

New citizens and permanent residents are asked — not required — to take the tests if they lack documentation of ties to relatives overseas. Physicians designated by the State Department typically collect samples from relatives abroad and send them to this country for testing.

A negative result does not eliminate the possibility of reunification. New citizens can adopt children under 16 and bring them to the United States, officials say. They can also petition for stepchildren or stepparents in certain circumstances.

But immigrants say officials rarely notify them of such alternatives. Meanwhile, lawyers say the government’s growing reliance on DNA testing burdens immigrants who often pay $450 or more to test parent and child.

Officials counter that the process helps reunify families who might otherwise remain divided because they lack adequate documents. But they acknowledge that genetic testing can carry an emotional toll.

Tamara Gonzalez, a new citizen from Jamaica, said her test result has forced her to question her very identity.

She and her father, who lives in Jamaica, took the tests last year after she applied to bring him to the United States. When she learned they were not related, she confronted her mother, who said the result must be a mistake.

Mrs. Gonzalez, who works at a day care center in Brooklyn, said she would like to believe her mother. But she said her faith in her family bonds had been shaken. “It changes my sense of who I am,” said Mrs. Gonzalez, who is 31. “And it has changed things between me and my mother.”

“I wonder now if there’s something she’s hiding or not saying,” she said. “I start to wonder: Who is my father? Am I ever going to know?”

Clevy Muir, the man she knows as her father, says he is still trying to sort out their options.

“I’m not going to give up my daughter, you understand?” he said. “But where can I turn?”

Balfour Francis, a 44-year-old Jamaican-born welder in Brooklyn, had even set aside a bedroom for the teenager he considers his daughter. She was born to a woman he had never married, but he had never doubted that she was his baby girl.

Then came last year’s DNA results. Now, he said, the bedroom is used for storage while he struggles to get immigration officials to tell him what he can do next.

“I will not let anybody dictate who is my child,” said Mr. Francis, who is a permanent resident and has a wife and children in New York. “I try to assure her I am who I will always be.”

Meanwhile, Isaac Owusu cannot keep the faces of his boys in Ghana out of his mind.

They call him collect on weekends, begging him to explain why he left them behind. At night, he sees them in his dreams with those big brown eyes that everyone used to say resembled his own.

“They ask me, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ ” he said. “ ‘You come and pick up our senior brother. What about us?’ ”

He blames the bureaucracy for the delay because he cannot bear to tell the truth. They are already motherless, he said. How can he tell them they are fatherless now, too?

Over the years, while his sister cared for the boys, he has sent money for tuition and uniforms, doctors and food. He has saved their letters. (“Father, in Ghana we are in the rainy season so I need two thing,” one son wrote, “rain coat and rain boot.”) He has pored over their report cards (“Obedient and respectful,” one teacher wrote), urging them to study harder so they could succeed here.

He moved, with a new wife, from an apartment to a house to make room for them all, and became a citizen in 2002. But last year’s DNA tests dashed his hopes for a speedy reunion.

After months of inquiries, Elizabeth M. Streefland, his immigration lawyer, finally determined that he could petition for the teenagers as their stepfather. He must prove that the boys are the children of his deceased wife. Isaac Owusu hopes that a DNA test of one of his wife’s siblings, which could be compared with that of the teenagers, would provide that proof.

That will cost more money. But he says he simply cannot give up on his boys. “I tell them, ‘Daddy still loves you,’ ” he said. “ ‘Anything it takes, I will do to get you over here.’ ”

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Eating fish in pregnancy could boost child's IQ

2007-08-05T17:07:00.003-07:00

Women who eat seafood while pregnant may be boosting their children's IQ in the process, researchers say.

The study, led by Dr. Joseph Hibbeln of the United States National Institutes of Health, tracked the eating habits of 11,875 pregnant women in Bristol, Britain.

It was revealed that women who ate more than 340 grams per week of fish or seafood - the equivalent of two or three servings - had smarter children with better developmental skills.

Children whose mothers ate no seafood were 48 percent more likely to have a lower verbal IQ score, compared to children whose mothers ate high amounts of seafood.

The results of the study were surprising and contradict American and British recommendations that pregnant women should limit seafood and fish consumption to avoid potentially high levels of mercury.

While experts believe further research is necessary to confirm these conclusions, the study's failure to find evidence of increased harm from eating fish is significant.

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Do you have to be smart to be rich? The impact of IQ on wealth, income and financial

2007-08-05T17:07:00.001-07:00

How important is intelligence to financial success? Using the NLSY79, which tracks a large group of young U.S. baby boomers, this research shows that each point increase in IQ test scores raises income by between $234 and $616 per year after holding a variety of factors constant. Regression results suggest no statistically distinguishable relationship between IQ scores and wealth. Financial distress, such as problems paying bills, going bankrupt or reaching credit card limits, is related to IQ scores not linearly but instead in a quadratic relationship. This means higher IQ scores sometimes increase the probability of being in financial difficulty.

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Early Tests Predict Adult IQ

2007-08-05T17:05:00.002-07:00

Scores on elementary school achievement tests have a lot to do with IQ and where kids end up later in life, a new study shows.

Researchers administered IQ tests to 219 adults in their mid-40s and compared each person’s IQ score to how well he or she had performed on elementary school achievement tests. They found that 41 percent of their IQ scores could be accounted for by the school achievement tests, a very strong correlation (slightly higher than the correlation between height and weight in adults, an unrelated pairing that is also strong).

How well the people did on their tests also predicted, to a lesser extent, their income as adults, their occupational status and the level of education they ended up attaining.

The findings suggest that achievement tests and IQ tests aren’t all that different, and that IQ remains consistent over time. “IQ is typically a very stable trait,” said lead researcher Ruth Spinks, a behavioral and cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Iowa.

The study also raises the question of how education influences accomplishment. People seem to be “locked in” to outcomes at early ages, said Douglas Detterman, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, who was not involved in the research. “It means we don’t know very much about education and optimizing education for particular individuals.”

Spinks, however, points out that all of her subjects went to school in Iowa, which has a relatively homogeneous education system, so it’s difficult to extrapolate about the effects of education generally nationwide.

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Marriage Brings Wealth, Divorce Steals It

2007-08-05T17:05:00.001-07:00

A new study confirms what any divorced person probably suspected: Scrapping a marriage robs you of wealth.

But the misfortune is more severe than merely divvying up the goods.

The study of about 9,000 people found divorce reduces a person's wealth by 77 percent compared to that of a single person.

"Divorce causes a decrease in wealth that is larger than just splitting a couple's assets in half," said Jay Zagorsky of Ohio State University.

Likewise, getting married makes people richer by more than just adding their assets together. Each married person, on average, sees his or her wealth nearly double. Married people increased their wealth about 4 percent per year just as a result of being married, with other factors removed from the equation.

"If you really want to increase your wealth, get married and stay married," Zagorsky said. "On the other hand, divorce can devastate your wealth."

The study relied on surveys of a group of people between 1985 and 2000. They were all between 21 and 28 years old in 1985. The findings are detailed in the current issue of the Journal of Sociology.

After divorce, men had 2.5 times the wealth of women, but this seemingly large disparity worked out to only about $5,100, on average.

For those who got divorced, wealth began to decline about four years before divorce and bottomed out the year prior to divorce.

Wealth begins climbing again in the year of the divorce, but not by much. "Even a decade after divorce, the median wealth stays below $10,000," Zagorsky said.

The study did not look for reasons, but Zagorsky said other research suggests the pooling of effort makes couples more efficient, and they live cheaper by sharing a house.

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Smart People Choke Under Pressure

2007-08-05T17:04:00.000-07:00

People perceived as the most likely to succeed might also be the most likely to crumble under pressure.

A new study finds that individuals with high working-memory capacity, which normally allows them to excel, crack under pressure and do worse on simple exams than when allowed to work with no constraints. Those with less capacity score low, too, but they tend not to be affected by pressure.

"The pressure causes verbal worries, like ‘Oh no, I can’t screw up,’" said Sian Beilock, assistant professor of psychology at Miami University of Ohio. "These thoughts reside in the working memory." And that takes up space that would otherwise be pondering the task at hand.

"When they begin to worry, then they’re in trouble," Beilock told LiveScience. "People with lower working-memory capacities are not using that capacity to begin with, so they’re not affected by pressure."

The findings are detailed this week’s issue of Psychological Science.

Working memory, also known as short-term memory, holds information that is relevant to performance and ensures task focus. It’s what allows us to remember and retrieve information from an early step of a long task, such as long-division math.

"In these math problems students have to perform subtraction and division, and if you’re trying to hold information in your memory and you start worrying about performance, then you can’t use your entire mental capacity to do the math," Beilock explained.

The study analyzed 93 undergraduate students from Michigan State University to determine their working-memory capacities. The students were divided into two groups, a high working-memory group (HWM) and a low working-memory group (LWM). Each person was given a 24-problem math test in a low-pressure environment. The HWM group did substantially better.

Then the two groups were given the same test, but were told that they were part of a "team effort" and an improved score would earn the team a cash reward. They were also told their performance was being evaluated by math professors.

Under this higher, real world pressure situation, the HWM group’s score dropped to that of the LWM group, which was not affected by the increased pressure.

Since working memory is known to predict many higher-level brain functions, the research calls into question the ability of high-pressure tests such as the SAT, GRE, LSAT, and MCAT to accurately gauge who will succeed in future academic endeavors.

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Children to nag adults through CCTV

2007-08-05T17:03:00.000-07:00

CCTV cameras will bark orders at people who misbehave in the streets of eight major British cities as part of a government scheme to cajole people into respecting authority.

Faceless bureaucrats will tell people off when they are being "anti-social" by dropping litter, behaving drunkenly, fighting, and, presumably, smashing up CCTV cameras and otherwise dismantling the apparatus of the nanny state.
Click here to find out more!

But these bureaucrats will be voiceless too - CCTV operators taking part in the scheme will use recordings of children's voices to browbeat wayward adults.

Cameras will be fitted with loud-speakers, but it is doubtful they will be fitted with microphones so people can answer back.

Using recordings of children's voices will make it harder for those in opposition to the surveillance society to be defiant of the talking cameras. Moonies and rude gestures will most definitely be a no-no.

Children will be recruited from schools to take part in the £0.5m scheme and shown round CCTV operating rooms on school trips.

Louise Casey, the government's "co-ordinator for respect", said in a statement this morning: "We are encouraging children to send this clear message to grown ups - act anti-socially and face the shame of being publicly embarrassed."

Graeme Gerrard, chair of the CCTV Working Group of the Association of Chief Police Officers, said a Middlesborough trial of the scheme had been used for "dispersing intimidating groups loitering in shopping areas, parks and housing estates". He did not say where the youths went when they'd been moved on.

A Home Office statement on the matter said the government would use the "power of pestering" to teach people what was unacceptable behaviour.

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The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt

2007-08-05T17:02:00.002-07:00

Once, when the old spymaster thought he was dying, his eldest son came to visit him at his home in Miami. The scourges recently had been constant and terrible: lupus, pneumonia, cancers of the jaw and prostate, gangrene, the amputation of his left leg. It was like something was eating him up. Long past were his years of heroic service to the country. In the CIA, he'd helped mastermind the violent removal of a duly elected leftist president in Guatemala and assisted in subterfuges that led to the murder of Che Guevara. But no longer could you see in him the suave, pipe-smoking, cocktail-party-loving clandestine operative whose Cold War exploits he himself had, almost obsessively, turned into novels, one of which, East of Farewell, the New York Times once called "the best sea story" of World War II. Diminished too were the old bad memories, of the Bay of Pigs debacle that derailed his CIA career for good, of the Watergate Hotel fiasco, of his first wife's death, of thirty-three months in U.S. prisons -- of, in fact, a furious lifetime mainly of failure, disappointment and pain. But his firstborn son -- he named him St. John; Saint, for short -- was by his side now. And he still had a secret or two left to share before it was all over.

They were in the living room, him in his wheelchair, watching Fox News at full volume, because his hearing had failed too. After a while, he had St. John wheel him into his bedroom and hoist him onto his bed. It smelled foul in there; he was incontinent; a few bottles of urine under the bed needed to be emptied; but he was beyond caring. He asked St. John to get him a diet root beer, a pad of paper and a pen.

Saint had come to Miami from Eureka, California, borrowing money to fly because he was broke. Though clean now, he had been a meth addict for twenty years, a meth dealer for ten of those years and a source of frustration and anger to his father for much of his life. There were a couple of days back in 1972, after the Watergate job, when the boy, then eighteen, had risen to the occasion. The two of them, father and son, had wiped fingerprints off a bunch of spy gear, and Saint had helped in other ways, too. But as a man, he had two felony convictions to his name, and they were for drugs. The old spymaster was a convicted felon too, of course. But that was different. He was E. Howard Hunt, a true American patriot, and he had earned his while serving his country. That the country repaid him with almost three years in prison was something he could never understand, if only because the orders that got him in such trouble came right from the top; as he once said, "I had always assumed, working for the CIA for so many years, that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land."

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The audio confession

Accident-prone people do exist

2007-08-05T17:02:00.001-07:00

Some people have all the bad luck. Whether you call them accident-prone, or just unfortunate, there's a group of people who really do have more mishaps than others.

Everyone seems to know a comic or tragic figure who tends to get into scrapes, but until now it has been hard to show whether they are genuinely more accident-prone than others. To answer this question, Ellen Visser and colleagues at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands analysed the results of 79 studies which examined how prone people are to having accidents. In all, the studies recorded the mishaps suffered by 147,000 people, drawn from the general population in 15 countries.

Strikingly, it appears that there is a discrete group of people who suffer the most accidents: 1 in 29 people have a 50 per cent higher chance of having an accident than the rest of the population (Accident Analysis and Prevention, DOI: 10.1016/j.aap.2006.09.012).

Visser says the study doesn't reveal which people in particular are most at risk, but it does show that a band of hapless people exists. Previous research suggests that children and people who work on oil rigs or as combat pilots, for instance, tend to have more accidents. But Visser suspects that the hapless have certain personality traits that predispose them to accidents.

LINK

Global Warming Doomsday Called Off

2007-08-05T17:01:00.001-07:00

Global Warming Doomsday Called Off

Global Warming Swindle

Britain's Channel 4 has produced a devastating documentary titled "The Great Global Warming Swindle." It has apparently not been broadcast by any of the networks in the United States. But, fortunately, it is available on the Internet.

Distinguished scientists specializing in climate and climate-related fields talk in plain English and present readily understood graphs showing what a crock the current global warming hysteria is.

These include scientists from MIT and top-tier universities in a number of countries. Some of these are scientists whose names were paraded on some of the global warming publications that are being promoted in the media -- but who state plainly that they neither wrote those publications nor approved them.

One scientist threatened to sue unless his name was removed.

While the public has been led to believe that "all" the leading scientists buy the global warming hysteria and the political agenda that goes with it, in fact the official reports from the United Nations or the National Academy of Sciences are written by bureaucrats -- and then garnished with the names of leading scientists who were "consulted," but whose contrary conclusions have been ignored.

There is no question that the globe is warming but it has warmed and cooled before, and is not as warm today as it was some centuries ago, before there were any automobiles and before there was as much burning of fossil fuels as today.

None of the dire things predicted today happened then.

The British documentary goes into some of the many factors that have caused the earth to warm and cool for centuries, including changes in activities on the sun, 93 million miles away and wholly beyond the jurisdiction of the Kyoto treaty.

According to these climate scientists, human activities have very little effect on the climate, compared to many other factors, from volcanoes to clouds.

These climate scientists likewise debunk the mathematical models that have been used to hype global warming hysteria, even though hard evidence stretching back over centuries contradicts these models.

What is even scarier than seeing how easily the public, the media, and the politicians have been manipulated and stampeded, is discovering how much effort has been put into silencing scientists who dare to say that the emperor has no clothes.

Academics who jump on the global warming bandwagon are far more likely to get big research grants than those who express doubts -- and research is the lifeblood of an academic career at leading universities.

Environmental movements around the world are committed to global warming hysteria and nowhere more so than on college and university campuses, where they can harass those who say otherwise. One of the scientists interviewed on the British documentary reported getting death threats.

In politics, even conservative Republicans seem to have taken the view that, if you can't lick 'em, join 'em. So have big corporations, which have joined the stampede.

This only enables the green crusaders to declare at every opportunity that "everybody" believes the global warming scenario, except for a scattered few "deniers" who are likened to Holocaust deniers.

The difference is that we have the hardest and most painful evidence that there was a Holocaust. But, for the global warming scenario that is causing such hysteria, we have only a movie made by a politician and mathematical models whose results change drastically when you change a few of the arbitrarily selected variables.

No one denies that temperatures are about a degree warmer than they were a century ago.

What the climate scientists in the British documentary deny is that you can mindlessly extrapolate that, or that we are headed for a climate catastrophe if we don't take drastic steps that could cause an economic catastrophe.

"Global warming" is just the latest in a long line of hysterical crusades to which we seem to be increasingly susceptible.

LINK

Study hints that fruit flies have free will

2007-08-05T17:00:00.003-07:00

A spark of free will may exist in even the tiny brain of the humble fruit fly, based on new findings that could shed light on the nature and evolution of free will in humans.

Future research delving further into free will could lead to more advanced robots, scientists added. The result, joked neurobiologist Björn Brembs from the Free University Berlin, could be "world robot domination."

"Seriously though," Brembs said that programming robots with aspects of free will "may lead to more realistic and probably even more efficient behavior, which could be decisive in truly autonomous robots needed for planetary exploration."

Better understanding aspects of free will in humans also could aid in the treatment of mental disorders where people face problems controlling how they feel, think or act, such as depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia nervosa, schizophrenia or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Brembs told LiveScience.

For centuries, the question of whether or not humans possess free will — and thus control their own actions — has been a source of hot debate.

"Free will is essentially an oxymoron — we would not consider it 'will' if it were completely random and we would not consider it 'free' if it were entirely determined," Brembs said. In other words, nobody would ascribe responsibility to one's actions if they were entirely the result of random coincidence. On the other hand, if one's actions were completely determined by outside factors such that no alternative existed, no one would hold that person responsible for them.

"We speculate that if free will exists, it is in this middle ground" between randomness and determinism "that is currently not well understood or characterized," said mathematical biologist George Sugihara at the University of California at San Diego.

Insects and other animals are often seen just "as very complex robots," Brembs said, for which behavior is determined solely by reactions to the outside world. When scientists observe animals responding in different ways to the same outside cues, such variations are typically attributed "to random errors in a complex brain," he said.

Not just random
Brembs and his colleagues reasoned that if fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) were simply reactive robots entirely determined by their environment, in completely featureless rooms they should move completely randomly. To investigate this idea, the international team of researchers glued the insects to small copper hooks in completely uniform white surroundings, a kind of visual sensory deprivation tank. These flies could still beat their wings and attempt to turn.

A plethora of increasingly sophisticated computer analyses revealed that the way the flies turned back and forth over time was far from random. Instead, there appeared to be "a function in the fly brain which evolved to generate spontaneous variations in the behavior," Sugihara said.

Specifically, their behavior seemed to match up with a mathematical algorithm called Levy's distribution, commonly found in nature. Flies use this procedure to find meals, as do albatrosses, monkeys and deer. Scientists have found similar patterns in the flow of e-mails, letters and money, and in the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Brembs said.

These strategies in flies appear to arise spontaneously and do not result from outside cues, according to findings detailed in Wednesday's issue of the journal PLoS ONE. This makes their behavior seem to lie somewhere between completely random and purely determined, "and could form the biological foundation for what we experience as free will," Sugihara added. "This function appears to be common to many other animals."

Brembs said that "even a fly brain possesses a function which makes it easier to imagine a brain that creates the impression of free will."

"If even flies show the capacity for spontaneity, can we really assume it is missing in humans?" he asked.

Condition for free will
Neuroscientist Gonzalo de Polavieja at the Independent University of Madrid said these findings in flies point "to a complex decision-making processing underlying behavior. This seems a necessary condition for free will."

Brembs did not think flies had free will, per se. He also stressed their results did not suggest free will existed in humans or elsewhere. "We only showed that brains might possess a faculty which free will could potentially be based on," Brembs said.

The degree of spontaneity that animals evolve could be linked with the niches they occupy in nature, Brembs added.

LINK

Who pays for Sweden's free lunch?

2007-08-05T17:00:00.001-07:00

Sweden's generous welfare system has served to break down the protestant work ethic, argues Captus's Nima Sanandaji.

Sweden has traditionally relied heavily on the strong protestant work ethic of its citizens. A cornerstone of the country's welfare system has been a population which has been reluctant to misuse the system. Although taxes have been high and government benefits generous, the strong work ethic has stopped people from taking advantage of the welfare state. Alas, this attitude has been largely abandoned. As time has passed, people have adapted to the system.

Dependence on state handouts is widespread amongst the adult generations. Today around 21-22 percent of the Swedish population in working age is being supported by one form government handout or another, up from around 11 percent in 1970 (as reported by Swedish Public Television 15th March 2005).

Many unemployed people are unwilling to take jobs that pay less than their former employment. The reason is that government compensation is often almost as high as their previous salaries; taking a job that pays less than their old one might very well mean lower income than the state benefit.

In a survey form the Swedish Enterprise Institute 70 percent of companies with 10-200 employees say that they interviewed who did not even want the jobs offered. This phenomenon is explained by the fact that people seek jobs that they are unwilling to take, only in order to convince public officials that they are actively seeking employment so they can continue collecting government handouts.

As widespread as government dependence is amongst adults, it might yet become worse amongst the new generation of Swedes.

In 2006 youth unemployment in Sweden was amonght the highest in the EU, fully 21.5 percent. Many young Swedes, in particular those with an immigrant background or from low income Swedish families, are becoming more and more used to the idea that it is acceptable to live off taxpayers' moneys. This is creating a phenomenon that can be described as a ”free-lunch generation”. A generation that does not clearly see the moral difference between earning something by hard work or receiving it from the state. The attitude is simply “anything that I want, I should have.”

It is not uncommon for young Swedes to choose to live off government benefits during a period of their lives, either faking that they are seeking employment or somehow convincing government officials that they are on sick leave. The reason might simply be that they have found a lucrative black-sector job, or that they want to use the time to focus on a personal project, such as a music career.

All Swedes who go to higher education today receive a handout from the state. Perhaps this is to be expected in a society with widespread dependence on politicians, but the attitude among these young students is remarkable. As one of them wrote in a letter to a newspaper:

“Why should I only get this handout only the months that I attend school?” Explaining that he needs money for going out with his friends and buying clothes all year round, the young author concluded: “I don’t have anything against working. But if the government doesn’t make sure that I have a job, it is their responsibility to pay me the handouts all year around”.

The system also routinely punishes those who work hard. If you are a college student and work part time parallel to your studies, your government loans will be reduced. And if you are unemployed, make sure not to take just any job. When a girl I know lost her job last year, she sought the first part time position that came along, although it was only a few hours.

While she had worked hard all her life and never relied on government support, she thought that it would only be fair to get some money to support her whilst she was seeking employment. But as it turns out, working a few hours disqualified her from receiving benefits for a period.

Later the same girl wanted to move to England. She explained that she believed that she would find it much easier to find work there compared to in Sweden. Was it possible for the unemployment agency to give her unemployment benefits when abroad? Well, yes, there is such a possibility. But only if she stayed in Sweden for a full period of 30 days as unemployed first. If she traveled to England to find work before the period had passed, there would be no support.

The Swedish welfare system is doing a good job at breaking the work ethic of the young. We have recently even seen a phenomenon where young people who couldn’t find employment became classified as on early retirement. Permanently shutting out young adults from the working market might not make much sense, but the solution comes in handy for local unemployment agencies that can thus reduce the number of those classified as unemployed.

Societies are based on norms and values. Two norms that have so far played an important part in making Sweden function are the work ethic and individual responsibility. But norms are influenced by the economic realities of a system. When many low income families find that they might very well earn as much money by staying home from work, or even more money if they combine handouts with black market jobs, more and more people will take advantage of this. And among particularly the young, the norms concerning responsibility and work will adapt to this situation.

As the world renowned Swedish author Johan Norberg recently wrote in The National Interest (Summer 2006):

“The system of high taxes and generous welfare benefits worked for so long because the tradition of self-reliance was so strong. But mentalities have a tendency of changing when incentives change. The growth of taxes and benefits punished hard work and encouraged absenteeism.

"Immigrants and younger generations of Swedes have faced distorted incentives and have not developed the work ethic that was nurtured before the effects of the welfare state began to erode them. When others cheat the system and get away with it, suddenly you are considered a fool if you get up early every morning and work late.”

The Swedish welfare system is effectively breaking down the very norms that make the society function. As people become more and more accustomed on living of government one question arises: who is ultimately going to draw the short straw and become forced to pay for the supposedly free lunch?

LINK

The face, not the body, attracts a mate

2007-08-05T16:59:00.001-07:00

Body builders and gym buffs, look away now. It appears that the opposite sex is much more interested in your face than your bulging biceps or elegant figure, especially if you're a man. At least that's the upshot of the first study to assess how much faces and bodies contribute to someone's overall attractiveness.

Twelve women and 12 men took part in a trial to assess the attractiveness of people in photographs, on a scale of 1 to 7. Some participants saw the entire person, some saw faces on their own, and some just bodies. Marianne Peters from the University of Western Australia in Crawley and colleagues assessed the face-only and body-only ratings to see how well they predicted the "entire person" ratings.

They found that faces account for more of the variation among ratings than do bodies; in other words, faces are more important. For women rating men, 52 per cent of the attractiveness score was made up by the face rating, while for bodies it was 24 per cent. The trend was similar when men rated women, with 47 per cent of a woman's overall attractiveness accounted for by her face, and 32 per cent by her body (Animal Behaviour, DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.07.012).

Peters says that women focus especially on the face because they are better at picking up emotional cues which are key to partner suitability.

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The prediction, from infancy, of adult IQ and achievement

2007-08-05T16:55:00.002-07:00

Young adults, originally tested as infants for their ability to process information as measured by selective attention to novelty (an operational definition of visual recognition memory), were revisited. A current estimate of IQ was obtained as well as a measure of academic achievement. Information processing ability at 6–12 months was predictive of adult IQ and of academic achievement with coefficients of .34 and .32, and coefficients corrected for unreliability of .59 and .53, respectively. The present results support and extend earlier studies indicating the continuity of intelligence from infancy to adolescence and illustrate the validity of early measures of recognition memory based on selective attention to novelty for the long-term prediction of achievement.

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The prediction, from infancy, of adult IQ and achievement

2007-08-05T16:55:00.001-07:00

Intelligence predicts scholastic achievement irrespective of SES factors: Evidence from Brazil

2007-08-05T16:52:00.000-07:00

This study explores whether or not intelligence tests' scores predict individual differences in scholastic achievement irrespective of SES factors such parents' income and education. The variables of interest are analyzed considering three independent samples of participants comprising a total of 641 children. The participants belonged to a Brazilian School characterized by broad and representative ranges in intelligence, scholastic achievement, and SES factors. The results indicate that SES factors do not predict children differences in scholastic achievement, whereas children's intelligence tests' scores predict their scholastic differences. These results underscore personal intelligence as a genuine predictor of individual differences in scholastic achievement.

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Firstborn sons have higher IQs, Norway study finds

2007-08-05T16:45:00.000-07:00

Firstborn sons have higher IQs than their younger brothers, and their social status within the family may explain why, researchers reported on Thursday.

A study that used military draft records for more than 240,000 Norwegian men found that firstborns had an edge of 2.3 IQ points on their next oldest brothers, who in turn beat brothers born third by 1.1 points on average.

Men who had been raised as the eldest, whether they were born first, second, or third, had IQs to match their first-born peers. The same was true for those raised or born second, Petter Kristensen and colleagues at the University of Oslo report in the journals Science and Intelligence.

"This study provides evidence that the relation between birth order and IQ score is dependent on the social rank in the family and not birth order as such," Kristensen's team wrote in Science.

Their studies confirmed what many scientists had suspected for more than a century -- that firstborns have an edge.

But attempts to prove the effect have been disputed, in part because the circumstances of each family are different.

To compensate for this, Kristensen's team studied brothers raised in the same families.

And some scientists argue that birth order IQ differences arise in the womb, while others point to family interactions.

To distill potential biological effects from social effects, Kristensen's team dug up the young mens' family birth records and found families whose first-born or first- and second-born children had died before the age of one year.

LARGER SHARE OF FAMILY RESOURCES?

That was when they discovered that it was not birth order so much as growing up as the eldest of the children in a family that made the difference.

Kristensen said the findings fit with most existing theories about why merely being older might affect someone's

IQ.

Various researchers have suggested that older siblings might benefit from a larger share of family resources, the process of tutoring their younger brothers and sisters, or from expectations placed on their social rank.

"Things like intellectual resources (and) stimulation from the parents to the child seem to be very important," Kristensen said in a telephone interview.

The findings swayed even skeptics of the theory that birth order affects intelligence.

"Birth order has been studied in relation to everything you can think of," said Joe Rodgers, a professor of psychology at the University of Oklahoma who was not involved in the research.

He said he was impressed that Kristensen's team was able to document a 2.3-point difference in IQ in such a large group.

"An awful lot of parents would pay money if their kids could increase IQ by two real IQ points," Rodgers said in a telephone interview.

The IQ differences were larger in brothers born into smaller families, and to married women with higher education. But the effect seems to vanish with greater age gaps between siblings, Kristensen's team wrote in the journal Intelligence.

It is unclear what the gap means for individual families, and if it can be found outside this population of young Norwegian men.

"I don't think it would surprise anyone that life is different in Norway than it is in the United States," Rodgers said.

However, "there is no reason to suspect that this should not be valid concerning women as well as men," Kristensen said.

He said he would be interested to see how siblings compare in cultures in which extended family members live together.

LINK

Reflective of collective human nature

2007-08-05T16:43:00.000-07:00

The Violent Brain

2007-08-05T16:41:00.002-07:00

Violent behavior never erupts from a single cause. Rather it appears to result from a complex web of related factors, some genetic and others environmental

On September 13, 2006, Kimveer Gill walked into the cafeteria at Dawson College in Montreal and, without apparent motive, shot 21 people, injuring 19 and killing two, including himself. The same day a judge in West ¿Virginia sent a woman to jail for, among other atrocities, forcing her six children and stepchildren to gorge themselves on food and then eat their own vomit. Also on the 13th, a court in New York sentenced a man for killing his girlfriend by setting her on fire--in front of her 10-year-old son. There was nothing special about that Wednesday. From around the world we hear reports of murder, manslaughter, cruelty and abuse every day. Violence is ubiquitous.

But what drives one person to kill, maim or abuse another, sometimes for little or no obvious reason--and why do so many violent offenders return to crime after serving time in prison? Are these individuals incapable of any other behavior? We have evaluated the results of studies conducted around the world, focusing on acts ranging from fistfights to murder, in search of the psychobiological roots of violence. Our key conclusion is simple: violent behavior never erupts from a single cause. Rather it results from a combination of risk factors--among them inherited tendencies, a traumatic childhood and other negative experiences--that interact and aggravate one another. This realization has a silver lining: positive influences may be able to offset some of those factors that promote violence, possibly offering hope for prevention.

Impulse Control
In 1972 an international team of psychologists launched one of the largest longitudinal studies ever conducted. The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study has now followed approximately 1,000 people born in the New Zealand city of Dunedin for nearly 34 years. Terrie E. Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, both at King's College London and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have participated in the study, examining, among other things, antisocial behavior associated with physical violence. They have observed that those who exhibit antisocial behavior fall into two distinct groups. Most are between the ages of 13 and 15, and their delinquency stops just as quickly as it starts. A small minority, however, display antisocial behavior in childhood--in some cases as early as age five--and this conduct continues into adulthood. Among this latter group, almost all are boys.

Perpetrators who carefully plan their crimes typically express no empathy or regret.

Indeed, male gender is the most important risk factor for violent behavior. As criminal statistics show, boys and young men commit the majority of physical assaults. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's statistics on crime in the U.S., 90.1 percent of murderers apprehended in 2004 were male and men accounted for 82.1 percent of the total number arrested for violent crimes. Girls and women are not necessarily less aggressive, as was assumed until the 1990s. But women engage in more indirect, covert aggression, whereas men tend toward immediate, outward physical aggression.

The causes of these gender differences are manifold. Learned sex roles certainly enter into it: "girls don't hit," for example, but "boys need to be able to defend themselves." Also, indirect aggressive strategies require a relatively high level of social intelligence, which girls develop earlier and faster. Moreover, neurophysiological discrepancies almost certainly play a role. The small group of males who exhibit chronic violent behavior from an early age typically share other telltale traits, among them a low tolerance for frustration, ¿deficiencies in learning social rules, attention problems, a decreased capacity for empathy, low intelligence and, most characteristic, extreme ¿impulsiveness.

Similarly, repeat offenders--particularly those who have long prison records--seem unable to keep their aggressive urges in check. The late neu¿roscientist Ernest S. Barratt and his colleagues at the University of Texas Medical Branch interviewed imprisoned criminals in Texas in 1999 and found that many inmates consistently picked fights, even though they knew that their lives would be made more difficult as a result. When asked why they continued to behave in ways that hurt them, many responded that they had no idea. Even though they understood the consequences and resolved to act with greater self-control the next time, they did not trust their own ability to keep their impulses at bay.

A Century of Change: Trends in UK statistics

2007-08-05T16:41:00.001-07:00

A Century of Change: Trends in UK statistics

The Theory of the Leisure Class

2007-08-05T16:39:00.002-07:00

An economic mystery: Why do the poor seem to have more free time than the rich?

As you've probably heard, there's been an explosion of inequality in the United States over the past four decades. The gap between high-skilled and low-skilled workers is bigger than ever before, and it continues to grow.

How can we close the gap? Well, I suppose we could round up a bunch of assembly-line workers and force them to mow the lawns of corporate vice presidents. Because the gap I'm talking about is the gap in leisure time, and it's the least educated who are pulling ahead.

In 1965, leisure was pretty much equally distributed across classes. People of the same age, sex, and family size tended to have about the same amount of leisure, regardless of their socioeconomic status. But since then, two things have happened. First, leisure (like income) has increased dramatically across the board. Second, though everyone's a winner, the biggest winners are at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.

To quantify those changes, you've got to decide exactly what leisure means. You can start by deciding what it's not. Surely working at your desk or on the assembly line is not leisure. Neither is cleaning or ironing. But what about standing around the water cooler, riding the train to work, gardening, pet care, or tinkering with your car? What about playing board games with your children?

Those are judgment calls, but it turns out not to matter very much what calls you make. When professors Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst combined the results of several large surveys (including studies where randomly chosen subjects kept detailed time diaries), they found that by any definition, the trends are clear.

In 1965, the average man spent 42 hours a week working at the office or the factory; throw in coffee breaks, lunch breaks, and commuting time, and you're up to 51 hours. Today, instead of spending 42 and 51 hours, he spends 36 and 40. What's he doing with all that extra time? He spends a little on shopping, a little on housework, and a lot on watching TV, reading the newspaper, going to parties, relaxing, going to bars, playing golf, surfing the Web, visiting friends, and having sex. Overall, depending on exactly what you count, he's got an extra six to eight hours a week of leisure—call it the equivalent of nine extra weeks of vacation per year.

For women, time spent on the job is up from 17 hours a week to 24. With breaks and commuting thrown in, it's up from 20 hours to 26. But time spent on household chores is down from 35 hours a week to 22, for a net leisure gain of four to six hours. Call it five extra vacation weeks.

A small part of those gains is because of demographic change. The average American is older now and has fewer children, so it's not surprising that he or she works less. But even when you compare modern Americans to their 1965 counterparts—people with the same family size, age, and education—the gains are still on the order of 4 to 8 hours a week, or something like seven extra weeks of leisure per year.

But not for everyone. About 10 percent of us are stuck in 1965, leisurewise. At the opposite extreme, 10 percent of us have gained a staggering 14 hours a week or more. (Once again, your gains are measured in comparison to a person who, in 1965, had the same characteristics that you have today.) By and large, the biggest leisure gains have gone precisely to those with the most stagnant incomes—that is, the least skilled and the least educated. And conversely, the smallest leisure gains have been concentrated among the most educated, the same group that's had the biggest gains in income.

Aguiar and Hurst can't explain fully that rising inequality, just as nobody can explain fully the rising inequality in income. But there are, I think, two important morals here.

First, man does not live by bread alone. Our happiness depends partly on our incomes, but also on the time we spend with our friends, our hobbies, and our favorite TV shows. So, it's a good exercise in perspective to remember that by and large, the big winners in the income derby have been the small winners in the leisure derby, and vice versa.

Second, a certain class of pundits and politicians are quick to see any increase in income inequality as a problem that needs fixing—usually through some form of redistributive taxation. Applying the same philosophy to leisure, you could conclude that something must be done to reverse the trends of the past 40 years—say, by rounding up all those folks with extra time on their hands and putting them to (unpaid) work in the kitchens of their "less fortunate" neighbors. If you think it's OK to redistribute income but repellent to redistribute leisure, you might want to ask yourself what—if anything—is the fundamental difference.

LINK

oes the Minimum Drinking Age Affect Traffic Fatalities?

2007-08-05T16:39:00.001-07:00

Since the mid-1970s numerous states have raised their minimum legal drinking age in an effort to reduce alcohol-related traffic accidents. This study examines determinants of a variety of traffic fatality rates at the state level for 1978, with particular attention to drinking age and drinking experience. The legal drinking age has no perceptible influence on fatalities, but inexperience in drinking is an apparent risk factor independent of age. The findings suggest that the effectiveness of higher drinking ages as a safety policy tool probably has been overstated.

LINK

Cognitive biases and science

2007-08-05T16:37:00.001-07:00

Scientists, educators, and policy-makers have long been concerned about American adults' resistance to certain scientific ideas (1). In a 2005 Pew Trust poll, 42% of respondents said that they believed that humans and other animals have existed in their present form since the beginning of time, a view that denies the very existence of evolution (2). Even among the minority who claim to accept natural selection, most misunderstand it, seeing evolution as a mysterious process causing animals to have offspring that are better adapted to their environments (3). This is not the only domain where people reject science: Many believe in the efficacy of unproven medical interventions; the mystical nature of out-of-body experiences; the existence of supernatural entities such as ghosts and fairies; and the legitimacy of astrology, ESP, and divination (4). This resistance to science has important social implications, because a scientifically ignorant public is unprepared to evaluate policies about global warming, vaccination, genetically modified organisms, stem cell research, and cloning (1).

Here we review evidence from developmental psychology suggesting that some resistance to scientific ideas is a human universal. This resistance stems from two general facts about children, one having to do with what they know and the other having to do with how they learn.

The main source of resistance concerns what children know before their exposure to science. Recent psychological research makes it clear that babies are not "blank slates"; even 1-year-olds possess a rich understanding of both the physical world (a "naÃ¯ve physics") and the social world (a "naÃ¯ve psychology") (5). Babies know that objects are solid, persist over time (even when out of sight), fall to the ground if unsupported, and do not move unless acted upon (6). They also understand that people move autonomously in response to social and physical events, act and react in accord with their goals, and respond with appropriate emotions to different situations (5, 7, 8).

These intuitions give children a head start when it comes to understanding and learning about objects and people. However, they also sometimes clash with scientific discoveries about the nature of the world, making certain scientific facts difficult to learn. The problem with teaching science to children is thus "not what the student lacks, but what the student has, namely alternative conceptual frameworks for understanding the phenomena covered by the theories we are trying to teach" (9).

Children's belief that unsupported objects fall downward, for instance, makes it difficult for them to see the world as a sphereâ€”if it were a sphere, the people and things on the other side should fall off. It is not until about 8 or 9 years of age that children demonstrate a coherent understanding of a spherical Earth (10), and younger children often distort the scientific understanding in systematic ways. Some deny that people can live all over Earth's surface (10), and when asked to draw Earth (11) or model it with clay (12), some children depict it as a sphere with a flattened top or as a hollow sphere that people live inside.

In some cases, there is such resistance to science education that it never entirely sticks, and foundational biases persist into adulthood. One study tested college undergraduates' intuitions about basic physical motions, such as the path that a ball will take when released from a curved tube (13). Many of the undergraduates retained a common-sense Aristotelian theory of object motion; they predicted that the ball would continue to move in a curved motion, choosing B over A in Fig. 1. An interesting addendum is that although education does not shake this bias, real-world experience can suffice. In another study, undergraduates were asked about the path that water would take out of a curved hose. This corresponded to an event that the participants had seen, and few believed that the water would take a curved path (14).

The examples so far concern people's common-sense understanding of the physical world, but their intuitive psychology also contributes to their resistance to science. One important bias is that children naturally see the world in terms of design and purpose. For instance, 4-year-olds insist that everything has a purpose, including lions ("to go in the zoo") and clouds ("for raining"), a propensity called "promiscuous teleology" (15). Additionally, when asked about the origin of animals and people, children spontaneously tend to provide and prefer creationist explanations (16). Just as children's intuitions about the physical world make it difficult for them to accept that Earth is a sphere, their psychological intuitions about agency and design make it difficult for them to accept the processes of evolution.

Another consequence of people's common-sense psychology is dualism, the belief that the mind is fundamentally different from the brain (5). This belief comes naturally to children. Preschool children will claim that the brain is responsible for some aspects of mental life, typically those involving deliberative mental work, such as solving math problems. But preschoolers will also claim that the brain is not involved in a host of other activities, such as pretending to be a kangaroo, loving one's brother, or brushing one's teeth (5, 17). Similarly, when told about a brain transplant from a boy to a pig, they believed that you would get a very smart pig, but one with pig beliefs and pig desires (18). For young children, then, much of mental life is not linked to the brain.

The strong intuitive pull of dualism makes it difficult for people to accept what Francis Crick called "the astonishing hypothesis" (19): Dualism is mistakenâ€”mental life emerges from physical processes. People resist the astonishing hypothesis in ways that can have considerable social implications. For one thing, debates about the moral status of embryos, fetuses, stem cells, and nonhuman animals are sometimes framed in terms of whether or not these entities possess immaterial souls (20, 21). What's more, certain proposals about the role of evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging in criminal trials assume a strong form of dualism (22). It has been argued, for instance, that if one could show that a person's brain is involved in an act, then the person himself or herself is not responsible, an excuse dubbed "my brain made me do it" (23). These assumptions about moral status and personal responsibility reflect a profound resistance to findings from psychology and neuroscience.

The main reason why people resist certain scientific findings, then, is that many of these findings are unnatural and unintuitive. But this does not explain cultural differences in resistance to science. There are substantial differences, for example, in how quickly children from different countries come to learn that Earth is a sphere (10). There is also variation across countries in the extent of adult resistance to science, including the finding that Americans are more resistant to evolutionary theory than are citizens of most other countries (24).

Part of the explanation for such cultural differences lies in how children and adults process different types of information. Some culture-specific information is not associated with any particular source; it is "common knowledge." As such, learning of this type of information generally bypasses critical analysis. A prototypical example is that of word meanings. Everyone uses the word "dog" to refer to dogs, so children easily learn that this is what they are called (25). Other examples include belief in germs and electricity. Their existence is generally assumed in day-to-day conversation and is not marked as uncertain; nobody says that they "believe in electricity." Hence, even children and adults with little scientific background believe that these invisible entities really exist (26).

Other information, however, is explicitly asserted, not tacitly assumed. Such asserted information is associated with certain sources. A child might note that science teachers make surprising claims about the origin of human beings, for instance, whereas their parents do not. Furthermore, the tentative status of this information is sometimes explicitly marked; people will assert that they "believe in evolution."

When faced with this kind of asserted information, one can occasionally evaluate its truth directly. But in some domains, including much of science, direct evaluation is difficult or impossible. Few of us are qualified to assess claims about the merits of string theory, the role of mercury in the etiology of autism, or the existence of repressed memories. So rather than evaluating the asserted claim itself, we instead evaluate the claim's source. If the source is deemed trustworthy, people will believe the claim, often without really understanding it. Consider, for example, that many Americans who claim to believe in natural selection are unable to accurately describe how natural selection works (3). This suggests that their belief is not necessarily rooted in an appreciation of the evidence and arguments. Rather, this scientifically credulous subpopulation accepts this information because they trust the people who say it is true.

Science is not special here; the same process of deference holds for certain religious, moral, and political beliefs as well. In an illustrative recent study, participants were asked their opinion about a social welfare policy that was described as being endorsed by either Democrats or Republicans. Although the participants sincerely believed that their responses were based on the objective merits of the policy, the major determinant of what they thought of the policy was, in fact, whether or not their favored political party was said to endorse it (27). Additionally, many of the specific moral intuitions held by members of a society appear to be the consequence, not of personal moral contemplation, but of deference to the views of the community (28).

Adults thus rely on the trustworthiness of the source when deciding which asserted claims to believe. Do children do the same? Recent studies suggest that they do; children, like adults, have at least some capacity to assess the trustworthiness of their information sources. Four- and five-year-olds, for instance, know that adults know things that other children do not (like the meaning of the word "hypochondriac") (29), and when given conflicting information from a child and from an adult, they prefer to learn from the adult (30). They know that adults have different areas of expertise: Doctors know how to fix broken arms, and mechanics know how to fix flat tires (31, 32). They prefer to learn from a knowledgeable speaker than from an ignorant one (29, 33), and they prefer a confident source to a tentative one (34). Finally, when 5-year-olds hear about a competition whose outcome was unclear, they are more likely to believe a person who claimed that he had lost the race (a statement that goes against his self-interest) than a person who claimed that he had won the race (a statement that goes with his self-interest). In a limited sense, then, they are capable of cynicism (35).

These developmental data suggest that resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, intuitive expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood if the scientific claims are contested within a society, and it will be especially strong if there is a nonscientific alternative that is rooted in common sense and championed by people who are thought of as reliable and trustworthy. This is the current situation in the United States, with regard to the central tenets of neuroscience and evolutionary biology. These concepts clash with intuitive beliefs about the immaterial nature of the soul and the purposeful design of humans and other animals, and (in the United States) these beliefs are particularly likely to be endorsed and transmitted by trusted religious and political authorities (24). Hence, these fields are among the domains where Americans' resistance to science is the strongest.

References and Notes

* 1. H. Nowotny, Science 308, 1117 (2005).[Abstract/Free Full Text]
* 2. "Teaching of Creationism is Endorsed in New Survey" New York Times, 31 August 2005, p. A9.
* 3. A. Shtulman, Cognit. Psychol. 52, 170 (2006). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 4. M. Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (Owl Books, New York, 2002).
* 5. P. Bloom, Descartes' Baby (Basic Books, New York, 2004).
* 6. E. Spelke, Cognition 50, 431 (1994). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 7. G. Gergely, Z. Nadasdy, G. Csibra, S. Biro, Cognition 56, 165 (1995). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 8. V. Kuhlmeier, K. Wynn, P. Bloom, Psychol. Sci. 14, 402 (2003). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 9. S. Carey, J. Appl. Dev. Psychol. 21, 13 (2000). [CrossRef] [ISI]
* 10. M. Siegal, G. Butterworth, P. A. Newcombe, Dev. Sci. 7, 308 (2004). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 11. S. Vosniadou, W. F. Brewer, Cognit. Psychol. 24, 535 (1992). [CrossRef] [ISI]
* 12. S. Vosniadou, in Mapping the Mind, L. Hirschfeld, S. Gelman, Eds. (Cambridge Univ. Press, New York, 2003), pp. 412â€“430.
* 13. M. McCloskey, A. Caramazza, B. Green, Science 210, 1139 (1980).[Abstract/Free Full Text]
* 14. M. K. Kaiser, J. Jonides, J. Alexander, Mem. Cogn. 14, 308 (1986). [ISI] [Medline]
* 15. D. Kelemen, Cognition 70, 241 (1999). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 16. M. Evans, Cognit. Psychol. 42, 217 (2001). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 17. A. S. Lillard, Child Dev. 67, 1717 (1996). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 18. C. N. Johnson, Child Dev. 61, 962 (1990). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 19. F. Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1995).
* 20. This belief in souls also holds for some expert ethicists. For instance, in their 2003 report Being Human: Readings from the President's Council on Bioethics, the President's Council described people as follows: "We have both corporeal and noncorporeal aspects. We are embodied spirits and inspirited bodies (or, if you will, embodied minds and minded bodies)" (21).
* 21. The President's Council on Bioethics, Being Human: Readings from the President's Council on Bioethics (The President's Council on Bioethics, Washington, DC, 2003).
* 22. J. D. Greene, J. D. Cohen, Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London Ser. B 359, 1775 (2004). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 23. M. Gazzaniga, The Ethical Brain (Dana, Chicago, 2005).
* 24. J. D. Miller, E. C. Scott, S. Okamoto, Science 313, 765 (2006).[Abstract/Free Full Text]
* 25. P. Bloom, How Children Learn the Meanings of Words (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000).
* 26. P. L. Harris, E. S. Pasquini, S. Duke, J. J. Asscher, F. Pons, Dev. Sci. 9, 76 (2006). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 27. G. L. Cohen, J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 85, 808 (2003). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 28. J. Haidt, Psychol. Rev. 108, 814 (2001). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 29. M. Taylor, B. S. Cartwright, T. Bowden, Child Dev. 62, 1334 (1991). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 30. V. K. Jaswal, L. A. Neely, Psychol. Sci. 17, 757 (2006). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 31. D. J. Lutz, F. C. Keil, Child Dev. 73, 1073 (2002). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 32. J. H. Danovitch, F. C. Keil, Child Dev. 75, 918 (2004). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 33. M. A. Koenig, F. Clement, P. L. Harris, Psychol. Sci. 15, 694 (2004). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 34. M. A. Sabbagh, D. A. Baldwin, Child Dev. 72, 1054 (2001). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 35. C. M. Mills, F. C. Keil, Psychol. Sci. 16, 385 (2005). [CrossRef] [ISI] [Medline]
* 36. We thank P. Harris and F. Keil for helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. Neither author received any funding for the preparation of this article.

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A New Improved America

2007-08-05T16:36:00.001-07:00

Something is wrong with the United States. I think most of us have noticed it. There is a mortal rot in the country, made manifest by many little rots that are hard to integrate mentally yet are, I think, somehow related. The change is grave, accelerating, probably irreversible, and fascinating. Things are not as they were.

The United States is the most hated country on the planet, followed by, to the extent that there is a distinction, Israel. So far as I know, there are no other contenders. You can say “Who cares?” as many will say, or “Screw’em if they can’t take a joke,” or “I’d ratherh be feared than loved.” All very droll. Still, it is an interesting datum. No country ever lives up to its own PR, but there was a time when America was widely admired. Now, almost universally, it is seen as a rogue state. And is.

This carries a price. The US consulate in Guadalajara is part fortress, part prison, with barriers and cameras and bars and rentacops, and they take away a woman’s lipstick if she is going to enter. Maybe a country that fears lipstick needs to think. The French consulate around the corner is wide open, like all others that I know of. The French, Chinese, Japanese and so on aren’t hated.

The US government now lives in its own, strange, insulated world.

(2) The United States is the most militarily aggressive country on the planet, followed closely by Israel. I am aware of no other contenders.

Some of this combativeness is obvious—attacking Iraq for no good reason, occupying Afghanistan, threatening Syria and Iran, attacking Lebanon by proxy, bombing Somalia, putting troops in the Philippines to hunt Moslems. The US is also looking for trouble with Venezuela, threatening North Korea, moving to “contain” China (Doesn’t a container need to be bigger than its scontents?), embargoing Cuba, pushing into Central Asia, increasing the military budget, and pushing NATO ever closer to Russia. (How stupid can you get? Very. Stay tuned.), And the Pentagon now has Africom, African Command. Africa is now America’s business.

(3) Powerful domestic hostilities grip the United States. Maybe you have to be outside of it really to see it. I live in Mexico. You can go for…well, five years and counting, without hearing angry talk about this or that group. In America, women hate men and men are getting sick of American women. Blacks hate whites hate Hispanics. “Affirmative action” engenders intense hastily that doesn’t go away. It isn’t the normal friction found in any country. It is serious antagonism quashed by federal force.

And the black-white-brown thing has very real potential for getting nasty. This we don’t talk about.

(4) A curious state fear prevails in America, but it is a governmental creation, a calculated manipulative Disneyland. Perhaps soon we will have Terror Mouse.

Recently I was in Washington. Everywhere there were the artificialities of fear. The steel pop-up barriers in the roads, the stop’em-bombs steel poles on sidewalks, the endless warnings to report suspicious behavior on loudspeakers in the subway. The searches of everything, the metal-detecting doorways even on buildings of country governments, of schools. (Schools, for Chrissakes. What is wrong here?) And of course the confiscation of shampoo at the airport. This is nuts.

(5) The bullying of people entering the US. Any country has the right to determine who enters. Fine. If you don’t want them to enter, don’t give them visas. If you issue a visa, try to be courteous.

Violeta had a visa, issued by the consulate, both times when we went to the US. Still she got bullied by the border Nazis. It was ugly. I am obviously not a Mexican, but I get the same hostile questioning as to where I am going, why I was in Mexico, and so on. It is none of their business where I go in my country. Or shouldn’t be, but there are no limitations on governmental powers now. A friend, married to a Mexicana, again with a visa, got separated from her, and both got abusive questioning. She came out crying.

America was not like this. Now it is.

Compare this with the real world. I land in Beijing—evil commie Beijing, right? Maybe twenty seconds to see whether my visa was valid, clonk of stamp, thank you, no baggage search, into a taxi. Vi and I land in Paris, en route to Italy. Glance at passport, yep, it’s a passport, no stamp, no nothing, on we go. Italy didn’t even look at our passports. Grown-ups.

I am not ashamed of the United States. It is a hell of a country. Been there, done that, loved it. In two weeks in DC with Violeta, although she is clearly not American, she was everywhere, always, treated with perfect courtesy and friendliness, whether on Cap Hill or Farmville, Virginia. Americans really are good folk. The government isn’t. It’s the gravest problem we face, both internationally and domestically.

(6) The Constitution really is going away, or has gone. It never did work as well as it should have, but few things human ever do. Habeas corpus is dead, right to an attorney, congressional right to declare war—it’s not even worth listing the list. Joe iPod in the burbs doesn’t care because it doesn’t affect him, yet. Git them Hay-rabs, ain’t no draft, plenty sushi. Urg.

(7) The increasing, detailed, intrusive regulation of life, the national desire for control, control, control. Everything is the business of some form of government. Want to paint your shutters? The condo association won’t let you. Let dogs in your bar? Never. Decide who to sell your house to? Racial matter. Own a dog? Shot card, pooper-scooper, leash, gotta be spayed, etc. Have a bar for men only, women only, whites or blacks only? Here come the federal marshals. What isn’t controlled by government is controlled by the crypto-vindictive mob rule of political correctness. This wasn’t always in the American character.

Add the continuing presence of police in the schools, the arrest in handcuffs of children of seven, the expulsions for drawing a picture of a soldier with a gun. Something very twisted is going on.

How much of the public knows what is happening, or even knows that something is happening? I don’t know. But I don’t think that it’s going to go away. In ten years it will be an entirely different place with the same name. Almost is now.

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The Holocaust, imagined as never before

2007-08-05T16:35:00.002-07:00

A quick glance at the perky cover of "My Holocaust," with its garlands of barbed wire, tiny figurines -- some in striped prisoner garb and some with shovels -- and candy-striped signposts to Auschwitz and Birkenau, all done in the manner of a cutesy toy village, is your first tip-off.

And soon after beginning this viciously funny, head-spinning novel about the commoditizing of victim-hood and the marketing of memorialization, you're hesitant to touch its pages, lest the coruscating satire burn your fingertips.

And once you've been introduced to the venal camp survivor Maurice Messer, who speaks with a Jackie Mason-style accent and once manufactured girdles but now runs Holocaust Connections Inc.; his son Norman, nerdy and self-aggrandizing in equal measure; and Norman's mysterious daughter Nechama, who converts and becomes Sister Consolatia of the Cross -- not to mention the finagling Rabbi Monty Pincus; the ditzy donor Gloria Bacon Lieb; her dopey, DustBuster-toting daughter Bunny; a Polish interpreter with a heart of malice and assorted other charlatans, true believers, conspirators and just plain loons -- you'll know why this book is different from all other Holocaust books.
REVIEW

"My Holocaust," by Tova Reich (HarperCollins, 326 pp., $24.95)

There have been countless deeply serious, heart-rending, stomach-turning, mind-boggling accounts of man's inhumanity, Nazi-style -- but this novel is clearly in its own class.

With humor that excoriates and rage that radiates from the page, Tova Reich lays into people who, in the process of avenging the 6 million Jews who died in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, sell their own souls.

Reich, the author of three novels and a contributor to Harper's Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly, takes no prisoners in this Swiftian satire. Not only does she mercilessly caricature Jews who find power, prestige and perks in merchandizing the response to the slaughter by creating a museum with "Teach a Terrorist" programs and boxcar replicas and piped-in narrations -- and then must go whoring after funding to support it -- she also cudgels representatives of other religions and groups who want their own piece of that grief-filled, guilt-filled, "gelt-filled" pie.

In her book, these graspers include truculent blacks, menacing nuns, sly Buddhists, oppressed Tibetans, conniving Palestinians, Chinese who suffered at the hands of the Japanese, Japanese who suffered Hiroshima, downtrodden women, chickens ...

Yes, chickens. The animal-rights people claim a holocaust of their own. It seems there is no grievance, huge nor petty, that the term cannot encompass. It also seems there is no group this author finds undeserving of a good skewering.

Reich, by the way, is no disinterested observer of the real-life battles between people who want the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., to be a place for scholarly study, dedicated solely to the memory of the Jews who died or survived the camps, and the "universalists" who see the holocaust as the ultimate "teachable moment" that can be utilized by any aggrieved group.

Her husband, Walter Reich, a champion of keeping the museum focused on academic research, was ousted as its director in 1988 during a brouhaha over whether Yassir Arafat should be allowed to visit. Her brother, Rabbi Avi Weiss, made headlines when he scaled a fence during protests over the Carmelite convent on the grounds of the Auschwitz camp. He gets tagged in the book as "that crazy spiderman rabbi." But while Reich might have a few large axes to grind, the book soars far above any personal settling of scores.

Dividing her novel into long set pieces -- Maurice, Norman and Monty take Gloria and Bunny to Auschwitz, hoping to score a major donation; the multitude of holocaust wannabes assemble in the ash fields outside the camp; the memorial museum itself is taken over by protesters -- Reich cracks her whip as the action grows increasingly frenetic and absurd.

In the end, though, Reich abandons the lacerating humor for a cry from the heart. Nechama/Sister Consolatia glides unnoticed through the hubbub at the museum, and she expresses what is owed -- not memories, not memorials, not museums, but eternal pain. She prays:

"It also is my passion -- to keep all the suffering that ever was and ever will be everlastingly fresh in my mind ... to be forever in a state of shock, of not believing my eyes, of being unable to breathe, of not being able to comprehend. ... Don't let me get used to it, Lord; that's all I ask.

"Let it always hurt just as much."

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500 Years of Women in Art

2007-08-05T16:35:00.001-07:00

PG-13 Films Loaded with 'Happy Violence'

2007-08-05T16:34:00.001-07:00

If you take a young child to the movies these days, you might find him staring placidly at the violence while you, the adult, look away. A new study suggests why kids today don't cringe at the violence in films: They don't associate violence with its natural consequences.

PG-13 films are loaded with "happy violence" that distorts the reality of pain and death, the study finds.

The films generally don't portray the injury, death and shattered lives that would be consequences of violent acts off the big screen, said UCLA researcher Theresa Webb. Instead, death appears "cool, swift and painless" and young viewers can be desensitized to the violent acts.

Webb examined 77 films rated PG-13 (selected from among the top grossing films of 1999 and 2000) and found 2,251 violent actions, with almost half resulting in death. A few did contain violence that was associated with pain and suffering. But only one film, "Pay It Forward," in which the young hero is stabbed to death, contained scenes that fully demonstrate the real horror of violence.

"Violence permeated nearly 90 percent of the films in this study," Webb said. "And while the explanations and causes of youth violence are very complex, the evidence is clear that media depictions of violence contribute to the teaching of violence."

Many of the action films in the study are more violent than R-rated films, Webb said. She argues that Hollywood insists that its only commitment is to transport and entertain viewers but in no way to edify or transform them.

"That's a cop-out," Webb said. "The science is clear that viewers do, in fact, learn from entertainment media. Indeed, popular films can act as powerful teachers engaging children and youths emotionally, even physiologically, in ways that teachers in classrooms could only hope."

Webb cites "ratings creep" as one reason films have gotten so violent.

"Ten years ago, a film that would have been rated R is now being rated PG-13," she said.

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