Cultureplaces

As governors and mayors debate when to lift their coronavirus stay-at-home orders, public health experts predict a flood of deaths should businesses be allowed to reopen before universal testing or a vaccine for the disease is available. These are the same experts whose  previous apocalyptic models  of coronavirus fatalities and  shortages  of hospital beds and ventilators have proved wildly inaccurate. It may be useful to look at some numbers for perspective.  As of 3 p.m. Eastern on April 16, there were  30,920 coronavirus deaths  in the U.S. New York state accounted for 14,198 — or 46 percent — of those deaths. New York City accounted for  11,477 of New York state’s deaths and 37 percent  of national deaths. This week, New York City  started counting  deaths as coronavirus fatalities if the patient had not been tested for the disease but was suspected postmortem of having it. This relaxed standard increased the U.S. death count  by 17 percent . Other jurisdictions will ine

Author links open overlay panel Richard  Lynn Show more https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2008.07.008 Get rights and content Abstract Results of five studies show that during the second half of the twentieth century there were increases in the Development Quotients (DQs) of infants in the first two years of life. These gains were obtained for the Bayley Scales in the United States and Australia, and for the Griffiths Test in Britain. The average of 19 data points is a DQ gain of approximately 3.7 DQ points per decade. Similar gains of approximately 3.9 IQ points per decade have been present among preschool children aged 4–6 years. These gains are about the same as the IQ gains of school age students and adults on the Wechsler and Binet tests. This suggests that the same factor has been responsible for all these secular gains. This rules out improvements in education, greater test sophistication, etc. and most of the other factors that have been proposed to explain

 Elliot M. Tucker-Drob, Daniel A. Briley, and K. Paige Harden Department of Psychology and Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin  Abstract  Genes account for between approximately 50% and 70% of the variation in cognition at the population level. However, population-level estimates of heritability potentially mask marked subgroup differences. We review the body of empirical evidence indicating that (a) genetic influences on cognition increase from infancy to adulthood, and (b) genetic influences on cognition are maximized in more advantaged socioeconomic contexts (i.e., a Gene × Socioeconomic Status interaction). We discuss potential mechanisms underlying these effects, particularly transactional models of cognitive development. Transactional models predict that people in high-opportunity contexts actively evoke and select positive learning experiences on the basis of their genetic predispositions; these learning experiences, in turn, reciprocally influence cog