Free Republic

In a recent paper, Lubinski and his colleagues caught up with one cohort of 320 people now in their late 30s. At 12, their SAT math or verbal scores had placed them among the top one-100th of 1 percent. Today, many are CEOs, professors at top research universities, transplant surgeons, and successful novelists. That outcome sounds like exactly what you’d imagine should happen: Top young people grow into high-achieving adults. In the education world, the study has provided important new evidence that it really is possible to identify the kids who are likely to become exceptional achievers in the future,...

The House voted Friday to cancel the annual diversity visa lottery and give those immigration visas to high-tech foreign-born who earn advanced degrees from American universities, as Republicans powered through their chamber the first major immigration bill since the election. The 245-139 vote was a test of the GOP’s plan to tackle immigration piecemeal, and while the bill passed, the strong opposition from Democrats suggests that Republicans’ strategy will face difficult hurdles. And while the chief selling point of the bill was to boost green cards given to science, technology, engineering and technology students, the bigger fight came over Republicans’...

Roger Clegg;Question for discussion: When and how should private companies be pressured by other private parties to change corporate policies for political — and especially civil rights — reasons? And how receptive should companies be to such pressure?As a general matter, it's hard to argue that there's anything wrong with bringing moral pressure to bear on a company that is thought to be acting immorally, even if its actions are perfectly legal. The problem in the civil rights area is that frequently there are conflicting notions of what it is right for the company to do. For instance, in the...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Lower birth weight and slower weight gain early in life may be associated with poorer psychological health in adulthood, new research suggests. The study of more than 9,700 UK adults followed since birth found that as birth weight increased, the risk of psychological distress in adulthood declined. The same association was found for weight gain until the age of 7, according to findings published in the October 5th issue of the British Medical Journal. On a brighter note, though, the study authors also found that relatively rapid weight gain after birth may compensate for the...