Surprise! The abortion rate just hit an all-time low.
After years of holding steady, new Center for Disease Control data shows that the United States abortion rate has fallen to an all-time low. It dropped 5 percent between 2008 and 2009, the most recent years for which data is available, the largest decline in the past decade.
The guys just can't look away as Catey Shaw (r,) and Kylie Lefkowitz walk in Times Square on Go Topless Day.
Study Questions Advantages of Organic Meat and Produce - NYTimes.com
In the study — known as a meta-analysis, in which previous findings are aggregated but no new laboratory work is conducted — researchers combined data from 237 studies, examining a wide variety of fruits, vegetables and meats. For four years, they performed statistical analyses looking for signs of health benefits from adding organic foods to the diet.
Top-Rated Diets Overall | US News Best Diets
U.S. News evaluated and ranked the 25 diets below with input from a panel of health experts. To be top-rated, a diet had to be relatively easy to follow, nutritious, safe, and effective for weight loss and against diabetes and heart disease. The government-endorsed Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) snagged the top spot.
Birthrate for U.S. teens is lowest in history – USATODAY.com
Teen births are at their lowest level in almost 70 years, federal data report today. Birthrates for ages 15-19 in all racial and ethnic groups are lower than ever reported.
Program: Botany of Desire
Episode: Full-Length Program
Featuring Michael Pollan and based on his best-selling book, this special takes viewers on an eye-opening exploration of the human relationship with the plant world, seen from the plants' point of view. The program shows how four familiar species -- the apple, the tulip, cannabis and the potato -- evolved to satisfy our yearnings for sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control.
Freshman 15 is a myth, study says - latimes.com
"Freshman 15," "Freshman 15"… how often do you read that stat about weight gain during that first year of college, and how often do you wonder if it’s true?
Two researchers – one at Ohio State University and the other at the University of Michigan at Dearborn -- decided to take a thorough look. In a study to be published in the December issue of the journal Social Science Quarterly, they report that…
.. drumroll ..
..it’s not true. It’s a myth. Weight gain among freshman students is far less than 15 pounds, as a rule — more like three pounds. And it doesn’t seem to have much to do with college: Young adults who don’t go to college gain just about as much weight as those who do.
The Agenda - Grinding America Down - YouTube
The Agenda - Grinding America Down
Buckingham said the flash mob final exam pushed the students to connect their song choices, choreography and costumes to their course material. The students had to explain their sociological relevance before they were approved.
Sociology is the study of human behavior and how people influence each other. The Wootton students not only had to organize to perform, they had to observe their audience while they did it.
The work done by most of my colleagues did bear on issues of wider relevance and not all of it was so ideologically compromised as to be useless. But the readership of academic journals is tiny, and most of this work had no impact beyond a small circle of interested academics — for understandable reasons. Philip Tetlock, a research psychologist at Berkeley, tested the accuracy of 82,361 predictions made by 284 experts including psychologists, economists, political scientists, and area and foreign policy specialists, 96 percent with post-graduate training. He found that their prognostications did not beat chance. The increasingly ideological nature of social science will not improve this record.
According to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, Harvard, donating 4 to 1 in favor of Democrats in 2008, was one of the more politically diverse major American universities. Ninety-two percent of employees at the University of Chicago donated to Democrats. The University of California favored Democrats over Republicans, 90 percent to 10 percent. And William and Mary employees preferred Democrats to the GOP by a margin of 99 percent to 1 percent. Neil Gross of Harvard found that 87.6 percent of social scientists voted for Kerry, 6.2 percent for Bush. Gross also found that 25 percent of sociologists characterize themselves as Marxists, likely a higher percentage than members of the Chinese Communist party. I would guess that if Lenin were around today he would be teaching sociology and seeking grants to fund the revolution.
I want to be rich and I want lots of money
I don’t care about clever I
don’t care about funny
I want loads of clothes and f***loads of diamonds
I
heard people die while they are trying to find them
Forget about guns and forget ammunition
Cause I’m killing them all on my own
little mission
Now I’m not a saint but I’m not a sinner
Now everything is
cool as long as I’m getting thinner
One reason that is not so farfetched: transgenerational effects are showing up not only in lab rats but also in people, as if the ghosts of our ancestors haunt our very genes. In 2006 scientists announced the findings of a study in a town in Sweden called Överkalix (chosen because it keeps excellent birth and death records). If a father began smoking before the age of 11, found Marcus Pembrey of the Institute of Child Health in London, his sons had a greater body-mass index, on average, than did sons of men who took up smoking as adults. In this same population, if a man suffered food shortages as an 8- to 12-year-old child, his sons’ sons were more likely to die young; if a woman suffered food shortages as a child, her son’s daughters were. Another study in Överkalix found that if a man overate in childhood, his sons’ children were four times more likely to develop diabetes and cardiovascular disease, found scientists at Sweden’s Umeå University.
The first thing that came to your mind when I raised this issue was probably the ideas held by people whose hatred of Barack Obama burns with such an intensity that nothing can disabuse them of the notion that the president is The Other, alien in birth and creed. According to a recent CNN poll, 41 percent of Republicans said Obama was "probably not" or "definitely not" born in the United States; a recent Pew poll found that 31 percent of Republicans believe that Obama is a Muslim, a figure that has gone up, not down, since he has been in office. When Republican officials are asked about these falsehoods, they often smile knowingly, then offer a half-hearted endorsement of the truth, as Mitch McConnell did recently ("The president says he's a Christian. I take him at his word"), leaving all possibilities open.
Experts at Cardiff University analyzed stretches of DNA from 366 children who had been diagnosed with the disorder. The scientists then compared the genetic samples from the ADHD children with DNA from 1,047 children without the condition. (More on Time.com: ADHD: A Global Epidemic or Just a Bunch of Fidgety Kids?)
But individual learning is another matter, and psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms — one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard — did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics.
Our review of the literature disclosed ample evidence that children and adults will, if asked, express preferences about how they prefer information to be presented to them. There is also plentiful evidence arguing that people differ in the degree to which they have some fairly specific aptitudes for different kinds of thinking and for processing different types of information. However, we found virtually no evidence for the interaction pattern mentioned above, which was judged to be a precondition for validating the educational applications of learning styles. Although the literature on learning styles is enormous, very few studies have even used an experimental methodology capable of testing the validity of learning styles applied to education. Moreover, of those that did use an appropriate method, several found results that flatly contradict the popular meshing hypothesis.
Comparing their life-satisfaction results with those of other countries, the researchers said the United States ranked ninth after the Scandinavian countries, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland and New Zealand.