Free Republic

WEST PALM BEACH — Incited by poor graduation rates in Palm Beach County, a national civil rights group sued the state Thursday, alleging it failed to ensure that all students receive the high-quality education guaranteed under the Florida Constitution. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the school district directly last year, but the case was dismissed on the grounds that the district was not the right party to sue. Now the national and state arms of the ACLU are bringing a class-action suit against the state on behalf of Palm Beach County students and parents. The lawsuit, filed in Palm...

What if we could know, scientifically, that one side has the edge in brainpower? Should that change how we think about political issues? Who are smarter, liberals or conservatives? This is the kind of question that could spark fierce and endless debates between political opponents, but what if we could know, scientifically, that one side has the edge in brainpower? Should that change how we think about political issues? Though few partisans on either side are likely to admit it, most people at one time or another have suspected that their political opponents are dim bulbs. Sometimes these sentiments get...

A forthcoming study on Hispanic children’s cognitive skills underlines the challenges the country faces in aspiring to close the achievement gap between these children and their white and Asian counterparts. Hispanic “children fall behind their peers in mental development by the time they reach grade school, and the gap tends to widen as they get older,” reports the New York Times. “The drop-off in the cognitive scores of Hispanic toddlers, especially those from Mexican backgrounds, was steeper than for other [low-income] groups and could not be explained by economic status alone. . . . From 24 to 36 months, the...

The children of Hispanic immigrants tend to be born healthy and start life on an intellectual par with other American children, but by the age of 2 they begin to lag in linguistic and cognitive skills, a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, shows. The study highlights a paradox that has bedeviled educators and Hispanic families for some time. By and large, mothers from Latin American countries take care of their health during their pregnancies and give birth to robust children, but those children fall behind their peers in mental development by the time they reach...

Spanking can get kids to behave in a hurry, but new research suggests it can do more harm than good to their noggins. The study, involving hundreds of U.S. children, showed the more a child was spanked the lower his or her IQ compared with others. "All parents want smart children," said study researcher Murray Straus of the University of New Hampshire. "This research shows that avoiding spanking and correcting misbehavior in other ways can help that happen." One might ask, however, whether children who are spanked tend to come from backgrounds in which education opportunities are less or inherited...

The word median is statistical: it is the point at which 50% of the observations of a thing are smaller and 50% larger. For example, according to the CIA Factbook, the median age of U.S. citizens is 37 years; thus, half the population is younger than 37, half older. Sometimes, as in Murray’s case, and in this review, the median is synonymous with average (sometimes the later implies numerical mean; the median and numerical mean are often nearly or practically equal). We accept that some people naturally excel at sports and that others, no matter the purity of their souls,...

<p>High-school students' performance last year on the SAT college-entrance exam fell slightly, and the score gap generally widened between lower-performing minority groups and white and Asian-American students, raising questions about the effectiveness of national education reform efforts.</p> <p>Average scores for the class of 2009 in critical reading dropped to 501 from 502, in writing to 493 from 494 and held steady in math, at 515. The combined scores are the lowest this decade and reflect stalled performance over the past three years. The reading scores are the worst since 1994.</p>

Every time they send a text message, watch a YouTube video, log on to Facebook and plug in their iPods, today's kids are getting stupider.At least, that's what Mark Bauerlein argues in his provocative book "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future."Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University in Atlanta, has spent the last few years touring the country evangelizing about the dangers of exposing the young to technology.His love-it-or-despise it book, newly released in paperback, has spawned heated arguments among parents, teachers and students who are spending more and more time plugged...

I was on the Yahoo homepage a second ago, and found a link that mentioned IQ's and such of famous people and what do you know! Obama is a genius! But I love how they come to that conclusion. And guess what? Republican IQ scores are very low. Who would have guessed...

There, I said it. After a year of campaigning, and 8 months of his Presidency, I have seen no evidence whatsoever that Barry Obama is actually more intelligent than George Bush. If we were keeping a running tally of gaffes, they are on course to be dead even. Without benefit of media cover, the populace at large would see the new President as a likable, sometimes well spoken buffoon. I would like to invite my fellow Freepers to use this post to present some of their favorite obama goofs and gaffes as sort of a reference post when engaging the...

The "professor gone wild" episode involving Harvard professor Henry Lewis Gates, Jr. has generated enormous media attention, but few, if any, commentators have tried to explain why this distinguished African American professor "lost it." Having personally encountered numerous black affirmative action professors first hand, let me offer an explanation that transcends this particular incident. First, Gates is the classic black "empty suit:" the articulate, well-attired, well-credentialed, superficially scholarly African American who is really an imposter, an actor playing a role. Gullible white outsiders (but not professors in "real" academic departments), are just easily conned by fancy vocabulary, name dropping and...

The dumbest Senator ever brags about his smarts ..

CHICAGO -- Researchers for the first time have linked air pollution exposure before birth with lower IQ scores in childhood, bolstering evidence that smog may harm the developing brain. The results are in a study of 249 children of New York City women who wore backpack air monitors for 48 hours during the last few months of pregnancy. They lived in mostly low-income neighborhoods in northern Manhattan and the South Bronx. They had varying levels of exposure to typical kinds of urban air pollution, mostly from car, bus and truck exhaust.

London, U.K. (AHN) - A two-year-old girl has become one of the smartest girls in the U.K. after her IQ was measured at 160, the same as that of physics professor Stephen Hawking and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Karina Oakley of Guildford, Surrey near London made the score in the Stanford-Binet IQ test administered by child psychologist Prof. Joan Freeman. Part of the test is answering questions and the tot gave imaginative answers. When Freeman asked, "What do you use your eyes for?" Karina replied, "You close them when you go to sleep" and "You put your contact lenses in...

Like all of this year's graduates, Moshe Kai Cavalin is excited that he completed college, with a degree in astrophysics. But unlike the majority of college grads, Cavalin is only 11 years old and stands 4 feet, 7 inches tall. At the age of an average sixth-grader, Cavalin has gradated from East Los Angeles Community College. But, graduating college at 11 may not be his highest goal in life. "I want to be a movie actor and compete in the 2016 Olympics in martial arts," Cavalin told NBC affliate Wood TV.

It might have been just a coincidence, but if it was, it was an awfully eerie one. Last week, 13-year-old Kayva Shivashankar won the 2009 National Spelling Bee by spelling the word "Laodicean." That word left a lot of Americans befuddled. Typically, the vast majority of Americans that are products of our nation's collective calamity known as the government schools have no clue how to spell or define the words used at the National Spelling Bee. "Laodicean" is certainly no different. The uninformed mainstream media did its typical best to keep Americans as uninformed as they are. Most of those...

Moshe Kai Cavalin, 11, graduates with honors from East Los Angeles Community College this week, but just don't call him a genius. 11-Year-Old Graduates From LA College Watch Video Moshe Kai Cavalin, 11, is graduating with honors from East Los Angeles Community College this week. "I consider myself a regular kid who works hard and does his best," says this only child of a Taiwanese mother and an Israeli father. When Cavalin started college at the age of 8, he may have been the youngest person in class, but he ended up tutoring some of his 19- and 20-year-old classmates...

Women with brains have more fun in bed than the average bimbo, new research suggests. A study of more than 2,000 female twins showed that those with greater emotional intelligence had larger numbers of orgasms. Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to monitor and manage feelings and emotions in oneself and others. The findings suggest that low EI is a risk factor for female orgasmic disorder, one of the most common sexual problems suffered by women. Up to 30 per cent of women find it difficult or impossible to reach a climax during sexual intercourse. Professor Tim Spector, director of...

Middle-class children are more likely to be clever than those from poorer families because they have 'better genes', former Ofsted chief Chris Woodhead said yesterday. The comments caused an immediate storm, with critics calling them insulting and 'crazy'. However, Mr Woodhead won support in some quarters - including the backing of an evolutionary psychologist, who said research had shown there was a link between class and average IQ. Mr Woodhead called for a return to selection by ability at 11. He suggested that grammar school pupils were more likely to be middle-class because 'the genes are likely to be better...

Three UK explorers surveying the Arctic ice were down to rations of just 90g of food each per day until a resupply flight reached them on Tuesday. Bad weather had frustrated repeated attempts to land new food stocks at the ice camp set up by Pen Hadow, Ann Daniels and Martin Hartley. The explorers, from the Catlin Arctic Survey, usually consume enough food to give them about 6,000 calories per day. The cut in rations took them down to just 1,000 calories each. In the last few days before the flight landed, the team had gone without any hot food...

The mathematical technique called factor analysis was invented by psychologists specifically to answer the age old question, "Is there more than one kind of intelligence?" We now know that there are two: one called fluid g, measured by culture fair tests such as the Raven Progressive Matrices or the LAIT, and another called crystallized g, measured by culture loaded tests like the Concept Mastery Test or the Miller Analogies Test. What we call g has been defined as the ability to "educe relations and correlates," or in more everyday terms, the abilities for inductive ("relations") and deductive ("correlates") reasoning. Culture...

... The unhappy fact is that different ethnic groups exhibit different profiles of results on tests. Attempts to devise a test on which this does not happen have all failed, across decades of effort, criticism, and analysis. Nobody knows why this is so; but the fact that it invariably, repeatedly, and intractably is so, makes testing hazardous — and ultimately pointless — under current employment law. Yet still employees must be selected somehow from applicant pools, and there must be some clear, fair criteria for their subsequent promotion. The state of the law now is that almost anything an organization...

"Gregory Cochran has always been drawn to puzzles. This one had been gnawing at him for several years: Why are European Jews prone to so many deadly genetic diseases?"

... In a heated debate that began in the journal Nature and spread online, they are calling for an end to research on possible links between race, gender and intelligence. "Stupid science" and "evil science" are the more polite terms being hurled. But the arguments for and against the research are not what you'd expect. Political correctness—as in, it's offensive and destructive to even ask if women as a group, say, are less intelligent than men—doesn't merit more than a brief nod, thank goodness. Instead, argues neuroscientist Steven Rose of Britain's Open University, the problem is that both race and...

In his history-making appearance on the Tonight Show, President Barack Obama stunned the nation with his offhand crack “I bowl like one of those retards in the Special Olympics.” During last Fall’s presidential race, Obama inspired titters by scoring a 37 in a bowling match in Pennsylvania. He says, though, that he’s been practicing in the White House alley and has recently scored as high as 129 in a single game. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs asked that Americans “show some class by not mocking the President’s lack of skills or his choice of words in describing them. The President has...

An Indian boy has an IQ greater than that of Albert Einstein at the tender age of six. Pranav Veera has an IQ of 176, while Einstein’s IQ was believed to be about 160. The little boy can recite the names of the U.S. presidents in the order they served in office, and is able to say the alphabet backward. Given a date back to 2000, Pranav can even tell which day of the week that was. He is highly competitive at playing Wii video games, and likes to play outside. Pranav’s parents have revealed that he seemed unusually intelligent...

If you surf the Internet, you've seen the ads for IQ tests which claim: Barack Obama's IQ is (the numbers vary from 135-171); Joe Biden's is 150; Hillary Clinton's is 155 and so on. Naturally, Republicans are rated much lower and a fake article on the presidents' IQ once claimed that George Bush's IQ was the lowest of all. The ad goes on to ask-Are you smarter than...? Well, I am and I can prove it unlike all these so-called claims of how smart our newly elected president is. There may be substance to these judgments of Barack Obama's intelligence,...

For decades, high-school students have taken community-college courses to dress up their resumes and prepare for college. Now, competitive middle-schoolers in Florida are flocking to sign up for high-school classes. For parents and students, it's a great chance to get ahead. And school districts have something else to brag about: seventh- and eighth-graders completing courses such as Algebra II Honors and biology that had been reserved primarily for ninth- and 10th-graders. But the nation's foremost scholars in middle-school education are worried the fast-growing trend is leaving minority children behind. They also question whether the practice is legal because, nationwide, it...

Tests carried out in 1980 and again in 2008 show that the IQ score of an average 14-year-old dropped by more than two points over the period. Among those in the upper half of the intelligence scale, a group that is typically dominated by children from middle class families, performance was even worse, with an average IQ score six points below what it was 28 years ago. The trend marks an abrupt reversal of the so-called "Flynn effect" which has seen IQ scores rise year on year, among all age groups, in most industrialised countries throughout the past century.

I'd never really paid much attention to him before being selected as Obama's vice president. Since then, even the MSM has called him for making idiotic statements. Joe Biden says a lot of really stupid things in public. Is Biden really that stupid or is he playing the role of the "idiot white guy sidekick" in order to legitimize the claims that Obama's IQ is "off the charts?" I mean, the Chairman can't even form a coherent sentence without a tele-prompter. So, is Biden just there to make Obama look less the fool?

Unfortunately for all of us still breathing braniacs, the title only applies to those of us who are also medieval Ashkenazi Jews, according to the authors of the 2006 paper "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence".Discussing "race" and intelligence is always a touchy subject and definitely not politically correct; but science should not be fettered by the chains of political correctness like a mangy circus lion. It must run free across the intellectual savanna, striking down the juvenile wildebeest of ignorance. Following articles on the biology and significance of race by Michael White, Massimo Pigliucci, and moi, my attention was directed...

... As president, Mr. Obama should use his bully pulpit to undermine the bachelor’s degree as a job qualification. Here’s a suggested battle cry, to be repeated in every speech on the subject: “It’s what you can do that should count when you apply for a job, not where you learned to do it.” The residential college leading to a bachelor’s degree at the end of four years works fine for the children of parents who have plenty of money. It works fine for top students from all backgrounds who are drawn toward academics. But most 18-year-olds are not from...

- And so many Christian ones? The institution of the Nobel Prize is one of the few things that's just as big outside Scandinavia as it is within the old land of the Vikings. (There will probably never be a McLutefisk, I guess..) In similarity with most members of this forum, I don't think people like Al Gore belong in the company of (other Nobel laureates) like Einstein, Fermi, Wałęsa, Hemingway, Marconi, Bohr, and Churchill. The older and wiser I have become, the more I've realized we Europeans often look up to the wrong kind of Americans (- but we...

ScienceDaily (Dec. 6, 2008) — University of California, Berkeley, researchers have shown for the first time that the brains of low-income children function differently from the brains of high-income kids. In a study recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, scientists at UC Berkeley's Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the School of Public Health report that normal 9- and 10-year-olds differing only in socioeconomic status have detectable differences in the response of their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is critical for problem solving and creativity. Brain function was measured by means of an electroencephalograph...

The brains of children from low-income families process information differently to those of their wealthier counterparts, US research suggests. Normal nine and 10-year-olds from rich and poor backgrounds had differing electrical activity in a part of the brain linked to problem solving. The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience study was described as a "wake-up call" about the impact of deprivation. A UK researcher said it could shed light on early brain development. The 26 children in the study, conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, were measured using an electroencephalograph (EEG), which measured activity in the "prefrontal cortex" of the brain....

To align Sarah Palin with Hillary Clinton on any level other than gender is both disingenuous and insulting. She has been the governor of a state whose economic structure (among other things) is unlike that of any other state in the country; 80 percent of their revenue is based in oil and gas! It’s too convenient and easy to pin her inadequacies on “the press’ demeaning” portrayal of her. To be fair, Sen. [John] McCain was the one who put her into this position, as Pete kindly pointed out to me; the guy who was willing to lose an election...

Asian and white eighth graders are far outpacing their black and Hispanic peers on a test that determines admission to New York City’s elite public high schools, perpetuating a stark racial imbalance that has swelled despite years of efforts to make the schools more diverse. While significant numbers of black and Hispanic students from public middle schools took the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test over the past two years, a small fraction scored high enough to earn a space in the freshman class. The test, a grueling two-and-a-half-hour set of English and math questions, is the single gatekeeper to eight...

Drudge has pic of Obama flipping McCain the bird on top of his site!

The number of children entering New York City public school gifted programs dropped by half this year from last under a new policy intended to equalize access, with 28 schools lacking enough students to open planned gifted classes, and 13 others proceeding with fewer than a dozen children. The policy, which based admission on a citywide cutoff score on two standardized tests, also failed to diversify the historically coveted classes. In a school system in which 17 percent of kindergartners and first graders are white, 48 percent of this year’s new gifted students are white, compared with 33 percent of...

Musicians Use Both Sides Of Their Brains More Frequently Than Average People ScienceDaily (Oct. 3, 2008) — Supporting what many of us who are not musically talented have often felt, new research reveals that trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person. The research by Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley and Sohee Park is currently in press at the journal...

Sen. Biden Has a Much Higher IQ Than You!

The violence and despair of the inner city are real. So's the problem of street crime. The longer we allow these problems to fester, the easier it becomes for white America to see all blacks as menacing and for black America to see all whites as racist. To close that gap, we're going to have to do more than denounce Mr. Murray's book. We're going to have to take concrete and deliberate action. For blacks, that means taking greater responsibility for the state of our own communities. Too many of us use white racism as an excuse for self-defeating behavior....

It was probably impossible for Barack Obama to find a more insufferable ass to run with than Joe Biden as you can see in this 1988 VIDEO of Biden running for the White House the first time around. Talk about an inferiority complex! Biden, on top of bragging about his IQ, loudly goes through a litany of his academic accomplishments. Guess what? He was lying through his teeth. Biden did NOT have a full academic scholarship and instead of graduating in the top half of his class, grauduated 76 out of 85. And no, this is not the material...

Biden and reporter on CSPAN 1988. Know your responsibility and IQ:)

The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, And order'd their estate. The 1982 Episcopal Hymnal omits that stanza, the second of Mrs. Alexander’s original six (not counting the refrain). It also omits her fifth: The tall trees in the greenwood, The meadows where we play, The rushes by the water, We gather every day … Understandable, in both cases. The fifth stanza might possibly be re-cast for a modern child (the hymn comes from Mrs. Alexander’s 1848 Hymns for Little Children), perhaps along lines like: The Xbox and the...

So far the internet provides little to no information about Obama's IQ Score, his college transcripts from Harvard, his GPA, his SAT or LSAT scores. Could Obama actually be as dumb as Al Gore? Wait... that's not possible. We know that Obama has less experience than a Home Owner's Association President, but could he have an IQ to match? Help me out if you find information about his IQ and other test scores. Thanks.

Asian American students will outnumber white classmates for the first time in the freshman class at the region's most prestigious public magnet school this fall, a milestone reached as the number of African Americans and Hispanics has remained low and the Fairfax County School Board prepares to review the school's admission policy. The rising concentration of Asian Americans at T.J. mirrors demographic trends in other elite math and science magnet schools. In New York, the selective and specialized Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School have Asian American majorities, although about 10 percent of...

A conversation between The Root Editor-in-Chief Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nobel laureate and DNA pioneer James Watson about race and genetics, Jewish intelligence, blacks and basketball and Watson's African roots. --- HLG: Imagine if you were an African or an African-American intellectual. And it's 10 years from now. And you pick up The New York Times and some geneticist says, A) that intelligence is genetic, and B) the difference as measured on standardized tests between black people and white people, is traceable to a genetic basis. What would you, as a black intellectual, do, do you think? JW: I...

WORKING-CLASS students have lower IQs than those from wealthier backgrounds and should not be expected to win places at top universities, an academic has claimed. Bruce Charlton, an evolutionary psychiatrist at Newcastle University, has written a paper asserting the reason why fewer students from poor families are admitted to Oxford or Cambridge is not because of social prejudice, but lack of ability. He suggests that low numbers of working-class students at elite universities is the "natural outcome" of "substantial" IQ differences between classes.... His claims could trigger an outcry similar to that faced by the Nobel prize-winning geneticist James Watson,...

DOWNEY, Calif. - With the end of another school year approaching, college sophomore Moshe Kai Cavalin is cramming for final exams in classes such as advanced mathematics, foreign languages and music. But Cavalin is only 10 years old. And at 4-foot-7, his shoes don't quite touch the floor as he puts down a schoolbook and swivels around in his chair to greet a visitor. "I'm studying statistics," says the alternately precocious and shy Cavalin, his textbook lying open on the living room desk of his parents' apartment in this quiet suburb east of Los Angeles.