It's an article of faith: the United States needs more native-born students in science and other technical fields. The National Academies' influential Rising Above the Gathering Storm report in 2006 said the nation should "enlarge the pipeline of students who are prepared to enter college and graduate with a degree in science, engineering, or mathematics" to remain competitive. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce had a similar message on the gap in so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) students a year before. President Barack Obama has pushed for more science teachers and...
Bad Economy: Sharp Rise in Runaways
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Over the past two years, government officials and experts have seen an increasing number of children leave home for life on the streets, including many under 13. Foreclosures, layoffs, rising food and fuel prices and inadequate supplies of low-cost housing have stretched families to the extreme, and those pressures have trickled down to teenagers and preteens. . . .The best measure of the problem may be the number of contacts with runaways that federally-financed outreach programs make, which rose to 761,000 in 2008 from 550,000 in 2002, when current methods of counting began. (The number fell...
To Remember is to Forget: Rethinking Memory
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“Having a memory that is too accurate is not always good” [from an evolutionary standpoint] . . . Put another way, memory and imagination are two sides of the same coin. Like memory, imagination allows you to put yourself in a time and place other than the one we actually occupy. This isn’t just a clever analogy: In recent neuroimaging studies, Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter has shown that remembering and imagining mobilize many of the same brain circuits. “When people are instructed to imagine events that might happen in their personal future and then to remember actual events in the past,...
Another Misleading Report About High School Dropouts and Income
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So, below I have reproduced the take home table in a new report on the social/economic loss resulting from high school dropouts in America, and the major gains we could make if we could just get people to graduate. Of course, this argument is totally ridiculous. Among other things, it assumes the following:That if inner-city kids got high school diplomas they would automatically also head up into the next income strata.That having or not having a diploma is THE key influence on one's income strata.That new graduates would have the same academic rigor and opportunity of prior graduates.Reports...
The Lost Generation
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Only 46% of people aged 16-24 had jobs in September, the lowest since the government began counting in 19...
The Encultured Brain: Why Neuroanthropology? Why Now?
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Why Neuroanthropology? Why Now?By Greg Downey and Daniel LendeNeuroanthropology also has direct implications for anthropology and neuroscience. It demonstrates the necessity of theorizing culture and human experience in ways that are not ignorant of or wholly inconsistent with discoveries about human cognition from brain sciences. Rather than broad-based concepts like habitus or cognitive structure, neuroanthropology focuses on how social and cultural phenomena actually achieve the impact they have on people in material terms. Rather than assuming structural inequality is basic to all societies,...
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