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IQ and Poverty

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One of the big taboo ideas in political discourse is the idea that some people are poverty-stricken not because of the way they are brought up but because they just are not very clever.

Deborah Orr has written a shocking and interesting article in The Independent about this:

fiveI think that you would be churlish indeed to assert that whoever set the ball rolling, and whoever dribbled it to the here and now, the 30 years we have just spent “managing the transition to a skills-based economy” have not resulted in happy and universal inclusivity. The bare fact is that not everybody is intellectually equipped to make for themselves a place in such an economy.

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If they are not looked after by their family, then the less bright, it is surely safe to assume, are often excluded from society because of their inability to make intelligent choices. Our refusal to look sympathetically on lack of intelligence as a real encumbrance in the modern world – or sometimes even to admit that it exists – is unfair on those who labour under that disadvantage.

Yes – it is in itself very stupid to claim that stupidity is the only cause of social blights and it is seemingly impossible to write about intelligence without coming across as an arrogant twit – but lack of intelligence is something that is almost never mentioned, because discussing it inevitably comes across as patronising, rude, and pointless.

Orr includes all the usual hedges about the dangers of generalisation, but what she is saying is genuinely important. The big problem is that intellectual disadvantage, either through genes or upbringing, is supposedly an intractable problem. Some are smarter than others.

Transhumanism then, is the ultimate expression of freeing the individual from tyranny. Throughout the Enlightenment new ideas challenged old dogmas. Superstition gave way to rationalism and empircism. Tyranny gave way to democracy.

And now Ray Kurzweil is challenging the greatest of all the inequalities: the skills and propensities we are born with.

[story via The Independent][image from woodleywonderworks on flickr]

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Friday Free Fiction for 11th July

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Good grief, would you believe it’s Friday already? Well, it surely is – and Friday means free fiction at Futurismic, as is customary. Eyeballs at the ready? Let’s go!

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Here’s another couple of titles from ManyBooks.net:

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Everything went a bit loopy with the Feedbooks RSS feed over the weekend, and I ended up with about 400 titles in my feed-reader, most of which seemed to be boxing-themed, for some odd reason. I think I only cleared out the duffers, and the sf titles I’ve already linked, but you may want to go browse around and check just in case.

Otherwise, there’s another huge wodge of Richard Kadrey‘s stuff:

Plus another novel by Matthew Phipps Shiel:

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Another free fiction site via SF Signal; Munseys, which has the following for your reading pleasure:

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Also via SF Signal are a few freebies from Solaris Books: a short story called “Tornado of Sparks” by James Maxey, originally published in The Solaris Book of New Fantasy, and the ongoing serialisation of Chris Roberson’s Three Unbroken.

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EOS Books are giving away a free electronic version of Karen Traviss‘ novel City of Pearl.

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At Subterranean Online this week, there’s an appreciation of Mike Resnick by Nancy Kress as well as a novella from Resnick, “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge“.

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And last but not least, your weekly helping of Friday Flash:

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And there it is; that should keep you busy for a while. Weekend web warriors should keep an eye on their feed readers over the next few days, as Futurismic begins syndicating its new resident webcomic – watch this space!

In the meantime, your tip-offs and shameless self-plugs are always welcome – FFF submission deadline is 1800 GMT.

Have a great weekend!

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Turning windows into solar panels

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apartment windowsI’d love to be able to fit solar panels to my home (not that we’ve been getting much sun this year, grouch grouch), but as I live in a flat I don’t have a roof to put them on. Thanks to a crafty hack from the boffins at MIT, that may not be a problem – they’ve found a way to turn windows into solar panels. [image by uqbar]

Sunlight is concentrated in existing solar power devices using large, mobile mirrors that track the sun as it moves across the sky. But these can be expensive to deploy and maintain. In the MIT device, called an “organic solar concentrator” and described in the latest issue of Science, the researchers painted a mixture of organic dyes onto the surface of a pane of glass. The dyes trap different wavelengths of sunlight and then guide the energy along the glass towards the PV cells at the edges.

“The point of all this is to get away with using far fewer solar cells,” said Marc Baldo, an electrical engineer at MIT. “The concentrator collects light over its whole front surface, but the solar cells need only cover the area of the edges.”

Not only does this make solar an option for people who don’t own an entire building, it also makes it a much cheaper proposition in general; solar cells aren’t cheap to make, and the industry can’t keep up with current demand as it stands.

And just to pre-empt someone piping up and saying that solar will never fully replace [energy source x], yeah, you’re probably right. But as one of a suite of renewable sources, it can make a contribution towards doing so – and right now we need every option we can get.

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Bookworms have stronger people skills

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The Bookworm I have occasionally wondered, as I write fiction, if what I am doing is really a particularly worthwhile way to spend my time. Shouldn’t I be off actually, you know, building something? Inventing something? Saving the planet?

Via Blogowych, I am encouraged to learn from Toronto’s Globe and Mail that:

A group of Toronto researchers have compiled a body of evidence showing that bookworms have exceptionally strong people skills.

Their years of research – summed up in the current issue of New Scientist magazine – has shown readers of narrative fiction scored higher on tests of empathy and social acumen than those who read non-fiction texts. And follow-up research showed that reading fiction may help fine-tune these skills: People assigned to read a New Yorker short story did better on social reasoning tests than those who read an essay from the same magazine.

Those benefits, researchers say, may be because fiction acts as a type of simulator. Reading about make-believe people having make-believe adventures or whirlwind romances may actually help people navigate those trials in real life.

And, yes, science fiction gets mentioned, although in that usual sort of “ooh, how icky” tone one encounters so often in news stories:

And do sci-fi tales about chasing aliens through the galaxy have the same benefits as Alice Munro’s short stories about love and loss?

This is a false dichotomy, of course. A story about chasing aliens through the galaxy can as easily be about love and loss as a story set in the here-and-now.

Besides, I’d argue that if one of the benefits of mundane fiction is that it acts as a “type of simulator” of real life, then one of the benefits of science fiction (oddly enough, maybe even in particular so-called Mundane SF) is that it acts as a type of simulator of how life may be affected by the never-ending and accelerating onslaught of the effects of technological change. So even if science fiction fans may not necessarily have exceptionally strong people skills (and certainly I’ve met a few at conventions who most emphatically did not), they may just possibly have exceptionally strong skills in other important areas, like adjusting to cultural upheavals and dealing with new technology.

And also exceptionally strong alien-chasing skills, of course. You never know when those might come in handy.

(Image: The Bookworm by Carl Spitzweg.)

[tags]books, science fiction, reading, psychology[/tags]

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EU asks Italy to stop fingerprinting Gypsies

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gypsyfamilyWhen I visited Eastern Europe about a decade ago, I was shocked at how much outspoken prejudice there was against the Gypsies. And I was shocked today to read in the Guardian:

Last week, Silvio Berlusconi’s new rightwing Italian administration announced plans to carry out a national registration of all the country’s estimated 150,000 Gypsies – Roma and Sinti people – whether Italian-born or migrants. Interior minister and leading light of the xenophobic Northern League, Roberto Maroni, insisted that taking fingerprints of all Roma, including children, was needed to “prevent begging” and, if necessary, remove the children from their parents.

The ethnic fingerprinting drive is part of a broader crackdown on Italy’s three-and-a-half million migrants, most of them legal, carried out in an atmosphere of increasingly hysterical rhetoric about crime and security.

The European parliament has asked Italy to stop doing this. Guardian columnist Seamus Milne suggests anti-migrant hysteria in Europe may be at the root of this.  Not that the U.S., or my home state of Arizona, where “crime sweep” publicity stunts target undocumented immigrants and stepped-up enforcement separates kids from parents, is exactly immune from xenophobia.

[image: Zingaro]

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