More Evidence That Lefties Have the Right Stuff

Between 1970 and 2003, the overall fertility rate dropped by about 8.9 percent in South Korea in the horse years of 1978, 1990 and 2002, only to quickly rebound, wrote Lee, who teaches at the University of Arkansas, and Paik, a graduate student at the University of Texas. In 2002, fertility declined by 7.5 percent.

"The decrease in fertility in 2002 is, by and large, due to birth timing," they found. There are approximately 29,900 missing girls or female pregnancies: 86 percent by birth timing, 3 percent by misreporting and 11 percent by abortion -- a positive sign, these authors suggest, since more than 20 percent of the fertility decline in 1990 was due to parents deciding to abort female fetuses.

"The large effect in 2002 has an important implication: zodiacal preferences have not disappeared, indicating that zodiacal preferences survive rapid social changes accompanied by economic development and social propaganda against the culture of the Horse," they concluded.

Analysis Shows 'IQ Gap' Closing

There's new evidence that the disparities in the IQs of blacks and whites may have narrowed by about a third in the past three decades.

"The constancy of the black/white IQ gap is a myth," William T. Dickens of the Brookings Institution and James R. Flynn of the University of Otago in New Zealand write in a Brookings working paper to be published in Psychological Science. "Blacks have gained 5 or 6 IQ points on whites over the last 30 years," they write, suggesting that the differences in black and white IQ scores stem from environment and not something hard-wired into the races.

The researchers analyzed nationally representative samples of blacks and whites on four different tests of cognitive ability.

Who Would Have Thought?Math Minors and Really Fast First Impressions

"Can Business and Economics Students Perform Elementary Arithmetic?" by Lionel G Standing, et al., Psychological Reports. A Canadian researcher and his colleagues administer 10 questions from a third-grade arithmetic test, and only 40 percent answer all the questions correctly.

"First Impressions: Making Up Your Mind After a 100-Ms Exposure to a Face" by Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov, Psychological Science, Vol. 17, No. 7. Princeton researchers find that people shown a head shot for a tenth of a second and asked to judge the subject's attractiveness, likability, trustworthiness, competence and aggressiveness made essentially the same judgments as they did when their viewing time was increased.