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Dan Hannan:
“…The fall in IQ scores in the West is perhaps the most under-reported story of our era. For most of the twentieth century, IQ rose by around three points per decade globally, probably because of better nutrition. But that trend has recently gone into reverse in developed countries.
You hadn’t heard? I’m not surprised. Journalists and politicians won’t go near the subject and you can see why. Consider the theories offered by neuroscientists for the decline. Some argued it had to do with the rising age of motherhood, because the children of older mothers tend to have lower IQs, other things being equal. No one likes to say this, because it can come across as “older moms have dumb kids,” which is not true. (My wife and I were 44 when our youngest child was born, and my own parents were also elderly, but that didn’t make me too thick to grasp the concept of statistical distributions.)
Other theories were even more explosive. For example, that unintelligent people were having more kids, or that the fall in average scores reflected immigration from places with lower IQs.
But a new study from Norway, which examines IQ scores from 730,000 men (standardized tests are part of military service there) disproves all these ideas, because it shows IQ dropping within the same families. Men born in 1991 score, on average, five points lower than men born in 1975. There must, in other words, be an environmental explanation, and the chronology throws up a clear suspect: the rise in screen-time.
Kids brought up with Facebook and Instagram are more politically bigoted, not because they don’t hear alternative opinions, but because they don’t learn the concentration necessary to listen to opponents — a difficult and unnatural skill…”
ATLANTIC OCEAN (Dec. 12, 2018) The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) transits the sea.
Satire, but is it?
“…A reporter at the German news magazine Der Spiegel — who won CNN’s Journalist of the Year Award in 2014 — resigned on Wednesday after admitted to making up stories.
Claas Relotius “falsified articles on a grand scale and even invented characters,” Der Spiegel admitted in a statement…”
Mrs. Paul Titus (above), a 77-year-old air raid spotter of Bucks County, Pa., carries a gun as she patrols her beat, Dec. 20, 1941. Mrs. Titus signed-up the day after the Pearl Harbor attack. I can carry a gun any time they want me to, she declared.
“…As officials in North Carolina investigate possible voter fraud in last month’s election, 33 people have already been convicted of the crime in Texas this year, more than the state’s combined total for the previous five years.
Eight others accused of voter fraud in the state are awaiting resolution of their cases, which typically involve violations by small-time vote harvesters paid to collect absentee ballots.
The violations were generally in local, nonpartisan elections – such as those for school boards, and primaries of both parties – and are not tied to the well-funded, high-profile Texas race in which Sen. Ted Cruz defeated Democratic rising star Rep. Beto O’Rourke in November.
“…I’ve just asked Lowenthal what he, as an advertiser, would be able to do with data transmitted from an internet-connected appliance, and I happened to mention a toaster. He thought through the possibility of an appliance that can detect what it’s being asked to brown: “If I’m toasting rye bread, a bagel company might be interested in knowing that, because they can re-target that household with bagel advertising because they already know it’s a household that eats bread, toasts bread, is open to carbs. Maybe they would also be open to bagels. And then they can probably cross that with credit-card data and know that this is a household that hasn’t bought bagels in the last year. I mean, it’s going to be amazing, from a targeting perspective.”
The thought experiment I put to Lowenthal—the CEO of The Media Kitchen, an advertising consulting firm—wasn’t some far-off hypothetical. Over the past several years, the American home has seen a proliferation of “smart,” or internet-connected, devices and appliances. There are, of course, smart speakers (which roughly a quarter of American homes have) and smart thermostats, as well as smart thermometers, smart mattress covers, smart coffee makers, smart doorbells, and even, yes, smart toasters. After Amazon recently announced the release of a slew of products compatible with its Alexa voice assistant, including a smart microwave and a smart wall clock, an executive for the company said he could imagine “a future with thousands of devices like this.”…”