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<p>LONGVIEW, Wash. -- The city council of Woodland, Wash., has decided to stop fluoridating the city's water.</p> <p>The council voted 6-1 Monday night to remove the additive from the water supply.</p> <p>Even if fluoridation prevents tooth decay, councilman John Burke said the city shouldn't make a medical decision for citizens without their consent.</p>

OAKLAND -- Some were attending a birthday party. Others were working at a downtown a hair salon or on their way to a fast-food restaurant. In less than 24 hours over the weekend, 12 people were shot along Oakland streets -- three of them fatally, their deaths marking the city's 63rd, 64th and 65th homicides of the year. As of Sunday evening, investigators had not identified a motive or a suspect in any of the shootings, and none appeared to be connected, police said.

Thanks to a couple of surveys, it’s being put about in certain circles that atheists have higher IQs than believers. That may or may not be the case, but one problem with this argument is that, if you accept "average group differences in IQ”, you get into all sorts of sinister debates which bien pensant atheist Lefties might find less to their liking.

“IQ is a metric of such dubiousness that almost no serious educational researcher uses it anymore,” the Guardian’s Ana Marie Cox wrote back in May. It was a breathtakingly ignorant statement. Psychologist Jelte Wicherts noted in response that a search for “IQ test” in Google’s academic database yielded more than 10,000 hits — just for the year 2013. But Cox’s assertion is all too common. There is a large discrepancy between what educated laypeople believe about cognitive science and what experts actually know. Journalists are steeped in the lay wisdom, so they are repeatedly surprised when someone forthrightly discusses the...

Cerys Cooksammy-Parnell playing chess at her home in Northampton (Picture: SWNS) An 11-year-old girl has become one of the smartest people in the UK by getting the maximum score on a Mensa IQ test – higher than Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.Cerys Cooksammy-Parnell, from Northampton, scored a mind-blowing 162 on the Cattell B scale.The schoolgirl sat the supervised test with her father Dean, 45, who is already a member of the elite intelligence club with an IQ of 142.Her father, who is a lawyer, came out of the test thinking Cerys had ‘fluffed it’ because of the speed at which...

Do you know your cobalt from your carbon? Can you identify planets from close-up images? Do you you know the difference between Assassins Creed and Thief game characters or name the eleventh doctor in Doctor Who? To celebrate YouTube's Geek Week the video site has created a quiz designed to help you find out exactly how geeky you are. The questions are generated at random and use clips from YouTube videos, TV shows, How-to instructional clips and more to create a Geek IQ score.

Young children who were breastfed as infants scored higher on intelligence tests than formula-fed kids, and the longer and more exclusively they were breastfed, the greater the difference, say Harvard University researchers in a study published today in JAMA Pediatrics. This study adds “to the body of literature of the association between duration of breastfeeding and cognition,” says NBC News diet and health editor Madelyn Fernstrom, Ph. D., CNS. But does breastfeeding make your child smarter? Fernstrom says this study shows an association, not cause and effect. The researchers analyzed 1,312 expectant mothers enrolled between 1999 and 2002 in Project...

Certain forms of IVF treatment are significantly associated with an increased risk of low intelligence in children, a major study has shown. A link was also found with an especially severe type of autism, but only in the case of twins or triplets. Scientists who analyzed data on more than 2.5 million births stressed that the chances of an IVF baby being affected remained tiny in real terms. …

This is a simple reaction test. I scored in the middle of the bell curve. Try it.

A new study from researchers in Europe claims that the average IQ in Western nations dropped by a staggering 14.1 points over the past century. "We tested the hypothesis that the Victorians were cleverer than modern populations using high-quality instruments, namely measures of simple visual reaction time in a meta-analytic study," the researchers wrote in the study, which was published online in the journal Intelligence on Thursday. "Simple reaction time measures correlate substantially with measures of general intelligence and are considered elementary measures of cognition."-snip- The results were measured using data from 1889 to 2004 and were analyzed by Michael...

A new study may stimulate the old adage of respecting your elders; it says the general level of intelligence in the Western Hemisphere has declined since the Victorian Era. The study claims the IQ numbers are 14 points lower than from the 19th century. One of the authors of the study, Dr. Jan te Nijenhuis, professor of work and organizational psychology at the University of Amsterdam, says the cause of the movement toward stupidity is that smarter women have fewer children while those of lower intelligence have more children. But Dr. Gerald Crabtree, professor of pathology and developmental biology at...

As is often the case with my brain, I need to mull over things sometimes to decide what I think about them. Such is the case with Jason Richwine, the Heritage Foundation scholar who was driven out when it was discovered that his thesis (which passed inspection at Harvard) reached the following conclusions: So what is actually in the dissertation? The dissertation shows that recent immigrants score lower than U.S.-born whites on many different types of IQ tests. Using statistical analysis, it suggests that the test-score differential is due primarily to a real cognitive gap rather than to culture or...

On Monday, May 6, Robert Rector and Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation published a study of the fiscal effects of immigration amnesty, arguing that the costs would amount to $6.3 trillion. Controversy greeted the report, but of the normal kind, with critics making specific allegations that the costs were calculated using unrealistic assumptions. On Wednesday, the Washington Post revealed that Richwine’s 2009 Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard’s Kennedy School had said that, on average, Latinos have lower IQs than do non-Latino white Americans and the nation should consider incorporating IQ into immigration decisions. The blogosphere and some elements of the...

As you no doubt have already heard, on Friday the Heritage Foundation accepted the resignation of one Jason Richwine, who in 2009 had completed a Harvard dissertation in which he probed the nexus between immigration and IQ. The decision revealed a shocking unwillingness on the part of Heritage to stand up to bullying and protect the academic freedom of its researchers. Perhaps the only good thing to emerge from all this has been the wide-scale distribution of the dissertation itself, a worthy if highly debatable document. It’s a pity that none of Richwine’s detractors seem to have seriously engaged the...

There are a ton of clips of Jason Richwine talking about race and immigration floating around the Internets. For example, Andrew Kaczynski of BuzzFeed posted a one-minute excerpt from an AEI event that Richwine attended and wrote: Here’s Video Of Another Time The Heritage Analyst Said Blacks and Hispanics Have Lower IQsJason Richwine, a senior policy analyst at the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation and co-author of a controversial report on the economic costs of immigration reform, said at a 2008 event that the “most important way” race was different was in IQ. He made similar comments in...

How low will supporters of the Gang of Eight immigration bill go to get their way? This low: They've shamelessly branded an accomplished Ivy League-trained quantitative analyst a "racist" and will stop at nothing to destroy his career as they pave their legislative path to another massive illegal alien benefits bonanza. Jason Richwine works for the conservative Heritage Foundation. He's a Harvard University Ph.D. who co-authored a study that pegs the cost of the Ted Kennedy Memorial Open Borders Act 2.0 legislation at $6.3 trillion. Lead author Robert Rector is a senior research fellow at Heritage, a former United States...

A co-author of a disputed Heritage Foundation report on a new immigration bill has resigned amid controversy over claims he made about immigrants having low IQs. A spokesman for the conservative think tank confirmed Jason Richwine's resignation Friday without offering details. Richwine was one of two authors of a report released Monday that said immigration legislation pending in the Senate would cost $6.3 trillion over 50 years as immigrants consumed federal benefits without making up for it in taxes. The report quickly came under attack as critics from the left and right said it didn't account for economic benefits from...

Al Hunt prefaced his remark by describing the issue of ethnicity and IQ as a "swamp". But did he then proceed to wade right into it? Morning Joe today took up the topic of the flap over a report on immigration produced by the Heritage Foundation. The panel's particular focus was a statement by report co-author Jason Richwine contained in his Harvard dissertation that "the average IQ of immigrants is substantially lower than that of native whites." Rather than rejecting the notion out of hand, Hunt asked "is that true of Asian immigrants? Is that true of all immigrants?" Ruh-roh!...

The Heritage Foundation made something of a splash with its study suggesting that immigration reform will cost the public trillions. Past work by one of its co-authors helps put that piece in context. Jason Richwine is relatively new to the think tank world. He received his PhD in public policy from Harvard in 2009, and joined Heritage after a brief stay at the American Enterprise Institute. Richwine’s doctoral dissertation is titled “IQ and Immigration Policy”; the contents are well summarized in the dissertation abstract: "The statistical construct known as IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability, or intelligence. The average...

The incompetence, decadence and stupidity that one wades through on a daily basis in the West contrast one’s daily experience in the East. To begin with, the common Orientals are smarter. That mean IQ of 105 versus 99 for Whites is a tremendous advantage in producing an intelligent, competent workforce. When you add to it a work ethic unseen in the West since 19th century Northwest Europe, and a Confucian morality, the comparison is not flattering to the West. -------------------cut---------------------- The sun also rises in the West Never give up. This being the birthday of the West’s redeemer compels one...