I wonder how that will work out? Seriously, since at least a century, we often had the best and brightest immigrants and I wonder how much that is skewing results? Something that MAY NOT continue. Especially if our fortunes go down, or our IP laws appear too restrictive.

Most of the immigrants are college level and beyond. I doubt they are doing scientific reasoning testing on college and graduate students. So, I don't think that factor plays into it. Or, did you mean that the kids of the best and brightest immigrants do better on the scientific reasoning test? Or maybe they do test it on college students? It doesn't say from the article.

Perhaps it's too early to measure China, or they suffer from too rigid a school system, or like Japan, their language is cumbersome it takes up a significant portion of schooling to just learn it, or as the one Ted Talks suggest - normal schools built on the factory model kill creativity, and so the asian ones must be doing that to an even greater degree.

I'm sick and tired of all the pet theories people have about China. Seems like everyone has a handful of these now.

But at least, like the fast food model, they ensure a minimum standard coming out. But that is public school's entire downfall. One size fits all. The person who wants to become the next doctor or scientific researcher is forced to do the same basic schooling as the person who just wants to fix cars until a ridiculously high grade.

Suburb public schools are miles better than downtown city public schools. Then, there are private schools and prep schools. Public schooling has a whole spectrum of quality.

I'm pretty sure by age 12, you can pretty much tell who the academic stars will be, who is mediocre and who the lazy slobs are. But that's 6th grade and still 3-4 more years are wasted on keeping everyone more or less the same. I'm pretty sure gymnastic teams or iceskating coaches need that long to spot who will be the talent and who will be the also ran.

This where the college you go to comes in. MIT, Caltech like schools choose the top students in engineering, others in athletics and so on.

But this is more than spotting stars in order to nurture them. Not everyone who does bad in school does bad in life. But the answer for them isn't always perpetually more years of school. We bought into the hype that formal education is the answer to everything that HR departments are requiring degrees for every little job and totally ignoring education outside the classroom that may be much better suited for training towards the work at hand. (I.e. the German model of apprenticeships).

Most jobs are given through word of mouth and not through HR departments. HR departments are there to find out what's wrong with you and not what's right with you.

The US is littered with policies and regulations built up on shaky statistical evidence. As an example, the policy of student confidence correlation with academic achievement. The idea was that since they are correlated if we increase student confidence we will increase academic achievement. We rank freakishly highest in student confidence but academic achievement isn't increasing.

The nation of the top scientific reasoners are satisfied with such statistical garbage is beyond belief. Does any of these statistical measures mean anything? How much is theories POTA (pulled out of the azule) and how much is statistically tested with all the factors accounted for. Even respectable papers do a bit of factor hiding. There was a paper that found that overweight patients in hospitals survive more from illness than normal weight patients - completely hiding the age factor in the statistical analysis. Normal weight patients who are admitted for illness were much much older than overweight patients!

Then the reaction of these news stories is always the same patterns: people with preconceived world view trying to fix the news to their views. Ooh, it doesn't say what happens 10 years into the future, ooh it shows public school policy X is bad etc etc.

My biggest fear with these UAV's is that we take the human factor out. I'm not talking about a human's ability to not kill innocent people--we know that is subjective--I'm talking about the military's decisions to carry out certain types of strikes when we literally have no "skin" in the game. It's already an issue with super accurate missiles and current generation of UAV's, these roomba-bombs may only make it worse.

Why do people keep saying this?

One of the major reasons for the effectiveness of the military is to be able to kill as thoughtlessly as possible. Before, it used to be a big problem that draftees or volunteers would not fire their weapons at enemies during battle. They implemented training routines to teach to shoot other human beings without thought to eliminate that problem.

You can see this everywhere in the military. For example, the military uses sanitized words for the process of killing. It's not enemies, it's hostiles. It's not killed, it's neutralized and so on.

What you describes still makes it a correlation study, just a well organized correlation study.

Taking your own quotes,

At any rate, what they don't know is what other chemical is causing this

blood caffeine levels, and found that those who drink a lot of coffee had the SAME identifiable immune response as the mice did, and that this immune response is also strongly correlated with protecting from further mental decline in humans.

It is still correlation.

Assuming there is causation, correlation is two way but causation might not be. Just because blood caffeine levels correlates with reduction of mental decline doesn't mean drinking more coffee will reduce mental decline. It could very well be that the reduced mental decline leads to the immune system pattern (or blood caffeine level).

Anyway, what you describe up there is not in the original article so you must know the research work from beyond the article I read.

And then you crash and you are fatigued, depressed, irritated, ravenous, edgy and anxious until you ride the caffeine train again.

Maybe coffee drinkers are correlated with something else that prevents Alzheimer's. I see no mention in the article that this is more than statistical correlation they have found.

Doing a controlled experiment where the only dietetic difference is the coffee is near impossible due to the cost.

Most recently, they reported that caffeine interacts with a yet unidentified component of coffee to boost blood levels of a critical growth factor that seems to fight off the Alzheimer’s disease process.

Typical conclusion section speculation from a correlation study IMHO.

I think it would be dangerous for people to drinking coffee assuming they are warding off Alzheimer's. Coffee has know to have bad effects on the body. It is a diuretic and a stimulant.

Most recently, they reported that caffeine interacts with a yet unidentified component of coffee to boost blood levels of a critical growth factor that seems to fight off the Alzheimer’s disease process.

to see that human relationship skills take practice and effort

Nope. Cats will catch a mouse if they've never seen a mouse before and will shadow hunt even if they've never seen a mouse before.

Human relationships skills are hard coded into us. Even if we don't have a relationship, we still shadow practice those skills and have mock conversations.

... is to go to shows and spend money at shows.

1. Get tickets to show that says 8PM.

2. Drive for an hour and then pay for parking/drive around to find parking.

3. Arrive there 8PM and wait outside in a line for 0.5-1 hour (the establishment that you paid over $50 in tickets won't let you use the restroom because nobody is allowed inside until the band is ready).

4. Get inside. Wait indefinite time (from 1-1.5 hours) until the opening band starts.

5. After opening band finishes, wait another 1-1.5 hours for the band you paid tickets to start.

6. Show finishes.

You start around 6PM and you are done at 1-2AM. Eight hours to listen to a 1.5 hour set from the band you're supporting. Meanwhile, all this empty time you end up buying junk food and alcohol from the establishment.

I hate going to live shows because of this reason - it's a time sink. Why don't the musicians start their shows on time and print the time each band will be starting on the tickets so I arrive and enjoy the show and leave.

It's amazing to me how irrational people become as soon as the subject of food comes up. Science? Evidence? What's that? People convince themselves of all kinds of ridiculous ideas about food and nutrition, none of which have even the slightest shred of evidence to back them up. Probably because people don't want it to be simply a matter of calories. It's another example of intellectual hedonism. People don't want to believe that the quantity of food they are eating is just too much. So they simply choose not to believe it. Instead they invent some simple rule that does not rely on calorie counting or ever being hungry. Fat doesn't make you fat. Sugar doesn't make you fat. Preservatives and MSG don't make you fat. "Refined" foods don't make you fat. Fast food doesn't make you fat. Burgers and donuts don't make you fat. Even insulin doesn't make you fat. If you are overweight (as I am) the only thing you can blame is your own lack of self-control. It's calories that make you fat. Fat people simply eat too much for the amount of physical activity they engage in. You could live on pure fat or pure sugar and huge amounts of preservatives and lots of MSG and as long as you didn't exceed 1000 calories per day you wouldn't gain weight. In fact you would probably lose it.

Every set of observable statistics has infinite theories to explain it, from which only one is right. Since our nutritionists and scientists can't give us a straight answer and we are drowning in obesity, everyone is looking for alternate theories. Everyone has their own little pet theory on why we get fat and unless you have been designing and running experiments, analyzing data to confirm or deny your problem, you're part of the problem you mention.

Look at what we were able to achieve with HIV and AIDS. We should be putting our resources like that to the obesity epidemic and once and for all, figure out what the right theory to explain everything is.

Fat burning is meant to be an additional energy source, not the primary one.

Wrong!. It has already been shown (with isotopic tracking) that fat cells were meant to be a temporary buffer, not a storage device. Fat molecules don't get stored away, they go into fat cells and come out like in a buffer, no isotopic fats really get stored away in the fat cells.

As for going through the rest of your posts and going point through point and arguing about it, let me say that settling these kinds of arguments are the job of scientists not random slashdot posters.

The only reason why these "carbs are bad" - posts are marked as insightful is that most people don't want to admit that their own behaviour is a part of the problem.

Or maybe that people don't want to admit that they are genetic dinosaurs, their bodies not being able to handle modern foods is evolution bitslapping them into selection pressure.

The truth is our minds find it easier to find positively stimulating things on screens then being active.

The government keep advertising on TV that not being active is the cause of being fat.

The truth is that it is bullshit.

A fit guy probably spends more time in the kitchen than in the gym, he will probably have more recipes to offer than exercise routines and techniques.

For most of my adult life I was 30 lbs over weight and tried all of the tricks. I'm a mechanical engineer so intuitively I knew energy in vs energy out was the key. So I said screw it, this year I'm going eat less no matter how much it sucks. I personally can't stand eating small meals so I decided to eat one meal a day. I drink coffee and tea during the day and have a big meal at night. I estimate the average daily calorie went from 3000 to 1800. Guess what? I lost 30 pounds over 4 months. Was it hard? You bet your ass it was. I was/am hungry most of the time. But at least I can look forward to that one nice meal at night. And it's not always a "healthy" meal. Sometimes it's a 1/2 lb cheese burger with fries. But that's still less than 1800 calories and that's all that counts.

Congratulations.

Now, the hard part is keeping those 30lbs from coming back.

The failings of "diets" isn't that you don't lose weight, it's that the weight comes back and comes back stronger. Fighting hunger eats away from a limited pool of willpower and when you have a huge project or a stressful event if your life that eats away your reserves to fight hunger, you will find after that the pounds have come back.

My point is that calories in, calories out model is wrong on the big picture.

I don't know why people keep repeating the "eat less, workout more" mantra in its various forms fed by bad science. There is a huge debate on if the "sloth gluttony sins" cause of obesity is scientifically correct.

People are not active because the body's hormones has been switched to get fat mode. If people ate more and the body did not get into fat conserving mode, they would be crazy active to burn off the extra calories - like little children in supermarkets running around. The human body loves burning energy, all our fondest memories and times of great joy have been activities where we used up a lot of calories.

The whole evolutionary advantage of storing fat argument is bullshit. Our body only stores fat and no other nutrients. At 10% body fat, low enough to get six-packs, it is enough fat to live off a month without eating. Our body regulates temperature, blood sugar level, acidity, blood composition and hundreds of other things but doesn't regulate our weight and we have to actively regulate it when even a 5% error either way can result in obesity from normal in a few years.