Comment Sebastian Anthony (Score 1) 97
I've said it before: Sebastian Anthony is submitting his own articles to Slashdot to get page views. Stop giving this guy ad-revenue money.
"Kildall, who passed away in 1994
... I think if he were around for the open-source movement, he would be such a huge proponent of it."
Doesn't the open-source movement go back to the 1970s? Admittedly, I'm not sure how easy it would be to get involved with open-source projects (other than open-sourcing your own private projects) before the age of the internet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
And people still assert this is in spite of decades of the Flynn Effect.
Here's the thing: the Flynn effect seems to be a real thing, but the Flynn effect seems to have stopped in the past decade or two in developed countries. "Recent research suggests that the Flynn effect may have ended in at least a few developed nations, possibly allowing national differences in IQ scores[4] to diminish if the Flynn effect continues in nations with lower average national IQs." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
There's even been some reports that IQs have begun declining in developed countries. (I wouldn't put too much stock in this just yet, but it might be a good indicator that the Flynn Effect is a relic of the 20th century.)
Scores on cognitive tests have been very widely reported to have increased through the decades of the last century, a generational phenomenon termed the ‘Flynn Effect’since it was most comprehensively documented by James Flynn in the 1980's. There has, however, been very little evidence concerning any continuity of the effect specifically into the present century. We here report data from a population, namely young adult males in Denmark, showing that whereas there were modest increases between 1988 and 1998 in scores on a battery of four cognitive tests–these constituting a diminishing continuation of a trend documented back to the late 1950's–scores on all four tests declined between 1998 and 2003/2004. For two of the tests, levels fell to below those of 1988. Across all tests, the decrease in the 5/6 year period corresponds to approximately 1.5 IQ points, very close to the net gain between 1988 and 1998. The declines between 1998 and 2003/4 appeared amongst both men pursuing higher academic education and those not doing so.
http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe...
There's an important genetic component to intelligence, but everything we've see recently suggests fetal development, nutrition, and education make such tremendously larger difference that the "idiocricy effect" could at most be considered a momentary blip.
Or maybe we should treat the Flynn Effect as a momentary blip.
So, what's going on? One possibility is that, in poorer countries, a substantial portion of the population is failing to get sufficient nutrition and stimulation to their children. This would have the effect of creating a portion of the population which is cognitively harmed - thus reducing the average intelligence of the population as a whole. As you get better nutrition across the entire population, you see the average IQ increase - but only because the bottom segments of society are improving (not because everyone is improving).
This would explain why poorer countries are continuing to see Flynn-effect improvements, but developed countries saw it's effect in the mid-20th century but isn't seeing any improvements lately (because the poverty that was harming childrens' brain development isn't happening anymore in developed countries).
Whatever the case, it's time to stop relying on the "Flynn Effect" as some kind of prediction that our future will continue to be bright. Here's an analogy: in the 20th century, we saw the average height of Japanese people increase significantly. This was due to better nutrition (protein, in particular, during childhood is important). We can also say that height is a strongly heritable trait. At this point, I think we should just accept that the Flynn Effect has topped-out in developed countries.
I don't think questions about declining IQs based on genetics is a bad question to ask, and I don't think 'trust the flynn effect' should be treated like it's an adequate answer. I realize I could be opening a whole can of worms, though, with this comment, because nobody wants to see a return of early 20th century style eugenics (which, by the way, was not only used by the Nazis, but was embraced in places like the United States). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
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Footnote regarding the heritability of height and IQ, which seem to be in the same ballpark, as far as heritability is concerned:
"Estimates in the academic research of the heritability of IQ have varied from below 0.5[2] to a high of 0.8 (where 1.0 indicates that monozygotic twins have no variance in IQ and 0 indicates that their IQs are completely uncorrelated)"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
"How much variation (difference between individuals) in height is attributable to genetic effects and how much to nutritional effects?" The short answer to this question is that about 60 to 80 percent of the difference in height between individuals is determined by genetic factors, whereas 20 to 40 percent can be attributed to environmental effects, mainly nutrition."
http://www.scientificamerican....
'If a student wants football and Greek life and not doing any work for class, they have every single Ivy League university to choose from,' Nelson says.
Yeah, I'm sure that's an accurate portrayal of Ivy League schools, and not some capitalist's attempt at devaluing the competition.
Women are 99% of the prostitutes.
That's not actually true. There are a lot more males working as prostitutes in the developed world than people realize.
"Most astonishing to the researchers was the demographic profile teased out by the study. Published by the U.S. Department of Justice in September 2008, Curtis and Dank's findings thoroughly obliterated long-held assumptions about underage prostitution: Nearly half of the kids — about 45 percent — were boys."
http://www.westword.com/2011-1...
On the related topic of sex trafficing, here's an article:
"In my visit to Care Corner Orphanage in Thailand I was shocked that most of the HIV-infected sex slave survivors were boys under the age of ten. I saw and learned of something similar in the Philippines and in Bangladesh. Upon reflection, I think part of the reason for my shock was because I was conditioned through the media, literature, photo and film to believe that this was a crime perpetrated against only girls and women. The photo above actually came from a video released a few days ago by Reuters titled The Trafficking Business in which the entire focus is females as victims and how millions of them are forced into the sex trade or sweat shops. While not untrue, it’s not painting a full picture either.
Speaking broadly on the topic of human trafficking – boys and men are trafficked far more than girls and women because, in part, strong bodies are needed for labor. And as it relates to sex trafficking, girls and women are victims to a larger extent. Many other crimes have such disparities but few place the disparity so high in their definition. All this is to say let’s define human trafficking and sex trafficking for what they are: horrific crimes against the most vulnerable populations. There are loads of ways to be vulnerable. Yes, one of many vulnerabilities is being a woman.
As I mentioned in The Other 20%, men raping boys is still a taboo topic. Even filmmakers who document the horrors of sex trafficking have told me they feel their work wouldn’t be accepted if it instead highlighted the abuse of boys. “The public isn’t ready for it,” I’ve been told. Truth is, we only speak about the victimization of boys when it’s forced on us by breaking-news scandals like those of Jerry Sandusky or The Boys Scouts of America. As the news story fades so too does the conversation. This makes it tough, then, to even entertain the idea of discussing, as I’ve heard from several high-ranking women in anti-trafficking organizations, that the sex traffickers, the actual criminals in the crime, are about 65% men. Such a statistic has a hard time taking root because there’s already the perceived and ingrained idea that men and men-only are the criminals."
http://goodmenproject.com/feat...
Women are overwhelmingly the victims of domestic abuse.
When asked, "Has your significant other hit you within the last month?", men and women are about equally likely to reply to that question with "yes". The difference is that women are more likely to be severely injured (because men are stronger) and women are more likely to be taken seriously as victims of domestic abuse. There's a prevailing belief that men should be capable of defending themselves - which leads to dismissal of female-on-male domestic violence, shame, and an unwillingness to admit that they are victims of domestic abuse.
"The Guardian: More than 40% of domestic violence victims are male, report reveals"
Campaign group Parity claims assaults by wives and girlfriends are often ignored by police and media
http://www.theguardian.com/soc...
The cost of feathers has risen, even down is up!
