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hessian sends this excerpt from The New Republic: "[A] person who scored 100 a century ago would score 70 today; a person who tested as average a century ago would today be declared mentally retarded. This bizarre finding — christened the 'Flynn effect' by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve — has since snowballed so much supporting evidence that in 2007 Malcolm Gladwell declared in The New Yorker that 'the Flynn effect has moved from theory to fact.' But researchers still cannot agree on why scores are going up. Are we are simply getting better at taking tests? Are the tests themselves a poor measure of intelligence? Or do rising IQ scores really mean we are getting smarter? In spite of his new book's title, Flynn does not suggest a simple yes or no to this last question. It turns out that the greatest gains have taken place in subtests that measure abstract reasoning and pattern recognition, while subtests that depend more on previous knowledge show the lowest score increases. This imbalance may not reflect an increase in general intelligence, Flynn argues, but a shift in particular habits of mind. The question is not, why are we getting smarter, but the much less catchy, why are we getting better at abstract reasoning and little else?"

An anonymous reader writes "Jeffrey Rosen, Legal Affairs Editor for The New Republic, explains why the E.U.'s proposed data protection regulation known as the right to be forgotten is actually 'the biggest threat to free speech on the Internet in the coming decade.' In the Stanford Law Review Online (there's a shorter version in TNR), he writes: 'The right to be forgotten could make Facebook and Google, for example, liable for up to two percent of their global income if they fail to remove photos that people post about themselves and later regret, even if the photos have been widely distributed already. Unless the right is defined more precisely when it is promulgated over the next year or so, it could precipitate a dramatic clash between European and American conceptions of the proper balance between privacy and free speech, leading to a far less open Internet.' According to Rosen, the 'right' goes farther than previously thought, treating 'takedown requests for truthful information posted by others identically to takedown requests for photos I've posted myself that have then been copied by others: both are included in the definition of personal data as "any information relating" to me, regardless of its source.' Examples of previous attempts this might bolster include 'efforts by two Germans convicted of murdering a famous actor to remove their criminal history from the actor's Wikipedia page' and an 'Argentine pop star [who] had posed for racy pictures when she was young, but recently sued Google and Yahoo to take them down.'"

Hugh Pickens writes "Lawrence Lessig — author, Harvard law professor, co-founder of Creative Commons — reviews The Social Network in The New Republic. Although Lessig says the movie is an 'intelligent, beautiful, and compelling film,' he adds that as a story about Facebook, it is deeply, deeply flawed because the movie fails to even mention the real magic behind the Facebook story, and while everyone walking out out of the movie will think they understand the genius of the internet, almost none of them will have seen the real ethic of internet creativity that makes success stories like Facebook possible. 'Because the platform of the Internet is open and free, or in the language of the day, because it is a "neutral network," a billion Mark Zuckerbergs have the opportunity to invent for the platform,' writes Lessig. 'And that is tragedy because just at the moment when we celebrate the product of these two wonders — Zuckerberg and the Internet — working together, policymakers are conspiring ferociously with old world powers to remove the conditions for this success. As "network neutrality" gets bargained away — to add insult to injury, by an administration that was elected with the promise to defend it — the opportunities for the Zuckerbergs of tomorrow will shrink.' Lessig laments that the creators of the movie didn't understand the ethic of Internet creativity and thought that the real story was the invention of Facebook not the platform that made such democratic innovation possible. 'Zuckerberg is a rightful hero of our time,' concludes Lessig. 'As I looked around at the packed theater of teens and twenty-somethings, there was no doubt who was in the right, however geeky and clumsy and sad. That generation will judge this new world. If, that is, we allow that new world to continue to flourish.'"

Timothy found a profile in The New Republic of Jonathan Schilling, a 53-year-old software developer from New Jersey who works to keep Hillary Clinton's Wikipedia entry clean and fair throughout the election season. "After he started editing her page in June 2005, Schilling became consumed with trying to capture her uncomfortable place in American culture, researching and writing a whole section on how she polarizes the public... [T]he attacks on Hillary's page mainly take the form of crude vandalism... It's different on Obama's page, where the fans — no surprise — are more enthusiastic, the haters are more intelligent, and the arguments reflect the fact that Obama himself is still a work under construction... The bitterness of the fights on Obama's page could be taken as a bad sign for the candidate. But it may actually be Hillary's page that contains the more troubling omens. Few, if any, Hillary defenders are standing watch besides Schilling. In recent days, the vaguely deserted air of a de-gentrifying neighborhood has settled over her page..."

sg3000 writes "It's official: the Democrats elected Howard Dean as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Dean won the position after a particularly contentious run for chairman, as reported in The New Republic. Governor Dean became a national figure during his impressive run for president in 2003, where he started as an outsider and long-shot candidate but became the front runner, only to see support fail to materialize during the Iowa caucuses."

An anonymous reader writes "Joshua Kurlantzick of the New Republic online writes that the internet--once heralded as a revolutionary force in politics--has turned out to be surprisingly nonthreatening to dictators and tyrannies. Reminds me of Howard Dean, and the trend to see technological change as a politically progressive force. Maybe this is not such a good idea?"

One week from today, the U.S. Judicial Conference will decide whether judges and their staff can handle grown-up responsibilities like ... using the internet. No, you did not click onto The Onion by mistake: after heated disagreement earlier this year, the issue is coming to a head. Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has a great Wall Street Journal opinion piece, today only. (It wants your email; try me@privacy.net.) Jeffrey Rosen's analysis in TNR is another good take on it. If you don't think the men and women who hold people's lives in their hands need daddy and mommy looking over their shoulder, you might take a moment to fire off a quick, polite email per the EFF's suggestion. If surveillance can invade a judge's workplace, it's for damnsure there's nothing keeping it out of yours.

anexilus sent in this essay by the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. He discusses genes, nature and nurture, and tries to allay fears that Gattaca will come to pass. Good reading.

asterisk5 writes: "The New Republic has an article from Seattle about the unions moving into new economy companies. Good stuff about the rise and fall of the Bezos cult of personality." When the illusions are stripped away, it's not pretty...

alkali writes "The New Republic has a short essay by Brendan Koerner which explains some of the legal history behind UCITA. If you've never heard of Mortenson v. Timberline before, you need to read this." Pretty good review of the the concept of liability for defective software.

alkali writes "The New Republic has a short essay by Brendan Koerner which explains some of the legal history behind UCITA. If you've never heard of Mortenson v. Timberline before, you need to read this." Pretty good review of the the concept of liability for defective software.

This is not totally on-topic for YRO, but interesting enough that we'll run it anyway. 1010011010 writes "Read the "Not Easy Listening" passage in the "Notebook" section of the latest New Republic; it talks about the National Association of Broadcasters' efforts to kill the FCC low-power radio initiative:" (more)

"So, as part of its efforts to kill the FCC's low-power radio initiative, the NAB recently flooded Capitol Hill offices with copies of a compact disc that purportedly demonstrated the type of interference that would occur on listeners' radios if the low-power stations were to go on the air.

[...]

"To generate the annoying cross talk, the NAB simply took two previously recorded radio programs and mixed them together in a sound studio; the result was, according to the NAB, a "simulation" of what would happen if a low-power radio station were placed close to another station on the FM dial."

"... kind of like MSFT's faked video 'evidence' during its anti-trust trial. Except that, instead of a smart cookie like Jackson, the audience is the bunch of suckers the voters of this fine country sent to D.C. The NAB has a section on "Low-Power FM" at their website, including "examples of real-world interference" ... faked? I don't know. But the 'examples' they sent to Congress were. They have provided an 8MB mp3 file -- that notoriously high-fidelity format -- as 'proof'. It's packaged into a self-extracting .exe zip archive, for some stupid reason. Maybe someone could run a little fidelity test on it; find out the sampling rate, frequency cutoffs, etc. If there's music clips in it, perhaps compare them to the original source from CD? Call your congressmen and sentators! Let them know this is a sham! Tell them we'll force Christian Slater to star in "Pump Up the Volume 2" unless they back off and stop pushing the "Radio Broadcasting Preservation Act," a.k.a. the "Government Protection for NAB Weenies Act of 1999" -- that states right at the top: A BILL To prohibit the Federal Communications Commission from establishing rules authorizing the operation of new, low power FM radio stations. "