Items to Share: 31 December 2012

Education Focus 

• Neuroskeptic: How Intelligent is IQ? IQ's in the news at the moment thanks to a paper called Fractionating Human Intelligence from Canadian psychologists Adam Hampshire and colleagues. Some say it 'debunks the IQ myth' -but does it? The study started out with a huge online IQ test...  

Other Business

• Adam Green: The Spectacular Thefts of Apollo Robbins, Pickpocket : The New Yorker...   "A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability." Fascinating discussion of skill, attention, misdirection--and not stealing anything.

• The Paperback Quest for Joy by Laura Vanderkam, City Journal Autumn 2012  "There are many books about happiness. It’s a subject of serious study within the fields of psychology and behavioral economics. So which book on happiness has been on the bestseller list for much of the past two years?" The self-help industry and its limitations. 

• Embodied Cognition: Our Inner Imaginings of the World Around Us Make Us Who We Are...(from Scientific American). "Starting as early as the 1970s, some cognitive psychologists, philosophers, and linguists began to wonder whether meaning wasn’t something totally different from a language of thought."

• 100 Diagrams That Changed the World | Brain Pickings "Since the dawn of recorded history, we’ve been using visual depictions to map the Earth, order the heavens, make sense of time, dissect the human body, organize the natural world, perform music, and even concretize abstract concepts like consciousness and love."

• Archbishop's Thought for the Day: 'if all you have is a gun,… 'In his final Thought for the Day this morning on BBC Radio 4, the Archbishop of Canterbury talks about the recent killings in Connecticut and discounts the argument often put forward that "it's not guns that kill, it's people", saying: "People use guns. But in a sense guns use people, too."' ... a thoughtful gloss on Maslow's "if your only tool is a hammer..." and the aftermath of Sandy Hook. (Re-posted from Christmas Eve)

Very best wishes for 2013!