YET MORE EVIDENCE FOR THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IQ

"Bigger is better when it comes to brain matter, says a leading neuroscientist. Canadian researchers examined the brains of 100 people who were given extensive IQ tests before they died and found a correlation between cerebral volume and intelligence. "This is essentially the first study that is actually looking at the size of the brain directly and not through imaging," Sandra Witelson, who headed the study at the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University, said Thursday from Hamilton. "What is very clear is that there is a correlation between brain size and intelligence, particularly verbal ability," said Dr. Witelson, noting that verbal ability encompasses comprehension of complex sentences, understanding verbal logical information and verbal memory.

The study looked specifically at the size of the cerebrum, the thinking part of the brain, and found a correlation with verbal intelligence in women. The same correlation was found for right-handed men. The research paper was published online this month by the journal Brain. Dr. Witelson is the scientist who made headlines in 1999 after painstakingly studying the brain of the scientific genius Albert Einstein. She discovered that one part of his brain - the inferior parietal region, which is related to mathematical reasoning - was 15 per cent wider on both sides than normal. Her latest study involved the brains of 58 women and 42 men who all lived and died in the Hamilton area over the past 25 years. The subjects had secondary stage cancers - their cancers had spread, or metastasized - and while still relatively healthy, they agreed to take the intelligence tests as well as donate their brains to science after death.

Some studies have looked at intelligence using MRI images of the brain, but Dr. Witelson noted there is room for ambiguity in the images that come through computer programs. Likewise, she said people can't just look at head size and determine that a smaller head means a smaller brain, or vice versa. "There's a lot inside a skull other than just the brain," she said. The brains in her study were weighed and the volume calculated through the simple Archimedes' principle - they were placed in water, and measures were taken of how much water was displaced".

More here

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SOME MORE NOTES ON KATRINA AND ITS AFTERMATH

Katrina cleanup: Private firms best: "There are many reasons for the difference between the lack of progress in Pascagoula and the quick cleanup in the Biloxi area. But officials here point fingers at what they consider the No. 1 culprit: the federal government and, in particular, the Army Corps of Engineers. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Harrison County, the home of Biloxi, and Jackson County, where Pascagoula is located, each had about 10 million cubic yards of debris to clean up. Both counties took up the federal government on its offer to foot the bill. But while Harrison County and all but one of its cities hired contractors on their own, Jackson County and its cities, at the urging of the federal government, asked the Army Corps to take on the task. Officials in Jackson County said it was a choice they had regretted ever since. The cleanup in Jackson County and its municipalities has not only cost millions of dollars more than in neighboring counties, but it is also taking longer".

Those who live in glass houses ....: "The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, which slammed the Bush administration for its allegedly slow and racially insensitive response to Hurricane Katrina, has yet to spend any of the estimated $400,000 that it raised for the victims of the Aug. 29 storm."

I have just put up here an interesting email from a reader that takes a skeptical look at the New Orleans fiasco.

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ELSEWHERE

There is yet another survey of American professors here which shows how strongly they adhere to Leftist politics. It also shows that the range of views among them is quite narrow. They march in lockstep to their Leftist drumbeat. They conform to an orthodoxy rather than being individual thinkers. No wonder they want to impose the same orthodoxy on everyone else.

Comment from Germany: "A former German hostage who spent 24 days in the hands of unknown captors in Iraq has said that her kidnappers were not criminals and had demanded humanitarian aid for Sunni Arab regions. She described her captors as "poor people" and said that she "cannot blame them for kidnapping her, as they cannot enter [Baghdad's heavily fortified] Green Zone to kidnap Americans." This has got to be another evil trick by Bush&Rumsfeld Inc. - incapacitating Iraqi terrorists ability to kidnap Americans by not allowing them to enter the Green Zone! Shocking!

The religion of peace: "A man allegedly killed his four daughters today by slitting their throats while they slept in their home in eastern Pakistan, after the eldest married a man of her choice, police said. "The man came to a police station ... after killing his four daughters," said senior police officer Mukhtar Iqbal Tikka. Nazeer Ahmed, who worked as a labourer near Burewala, some 110 kilometres east of Multan, had resented his eldest daughter's love marriage and killed the three others, fearing they might follow her, Tikka said. Ahmed allegedly told police his eldest daughter Muqadas Bibi, 25, had married a man of her choice against his wishes and her act had tarnished the family's honour so he plotted to kill her and his other daughters".

Stupid Jewish Leftists: "The movement of which I am a member has just voted against a war that I support. This vote by the Union of Reform Judaism was the first vote by a major national Jewish organization or religious movement opposing the war in Iraq. This war was and is being fought for American reasons, not Jewish reasons. However, to see this war that toppled one of Israel's fiercest enemies-an anti-Semitic dictator who sent $25,000 to the families of every jihadist who had been able to kill and maim Israeli children and other innocents-opposed by Jews is more than an act of ingratitude to this country and this president. This vote was an act of stunning and incomprehensible historical blindness".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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