Politically correct mathematics!

The article below is rather coy about it but they are clearly trying to convey that children develop high math skills by the mere presence of parents with high math skills. They want to avoid the conclusion that a kid's intelligence is all due to that nasty genetics.  There is something else there as well which can make you bright.

And it may well be true that having a bright parent cues you into strategies that are helpful in mathematics.  But their research does not prove that.  All they did was old stuff: They correlated parental math scores with offspring math scores.  And there was, as usual, a strong association between the two.  There was nothing in their findings that could not be explained by a wholly genetic transmission of mathematical ability. 

We have known for around 100 years that mathematical ability is genetically transmitted so there was really no point to the study. Its only point was its "slant" towards a politically correct conclusion.


Parents' math skills 'rub off' on their children

First evidence found of intergenerational transmission of an unlearned, nonverbal competence in mathematics

Summary:
Parents who excel at math produce children who excel at math. This is according to a recent study that shows a distinct transfer of math skills from parent to child. The study specifically explored intergenerational transmission -- the concept of parental influence on an offspring's behavior or psychology -- in mathematic capabilities.
   
FULL STORY
Parents who excel at math produce children who excel at math. This is according to a recently released University of Pittsburgh study, which shows a distinct transfer of math skills from parent to child. The study specifically explored intergenerational transmission -- the concept of parental influence on an offspring's behavior or psychology -- in mathematic capabilities.

"Our findings suggest an intuitive sense for numbers has been passed down -- knowingly or unknowingly -- from parent to child. Meaning, essentially, the math skills of parents tend to 'rub off' on their children," said lead researcher Melissa E. Libertus, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and a research scientist in the University's Learning Research and Development Center. The Department of Psychology is within the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. "This research could have significant ramifications for how parents are advised to talk about math and numbers with their children and how teachers go about teaching children in classrooms."

Within the study, Pitt's researchers found that the performance levels for early school-aged children on standardized mathematic tests could be reliably predicted by their parent's performance on similar examinations. Specifically, they observed major correlations in parent-child performance in such key areas as mathematical computations, number-fact recall, and word problem analysis. Surprisingly, the researchers also found that children's intuitive sense of numbers -- i.e. the ability to know that 20 jelly beans are more than 10 jelly beans without first counting them -- is predicted by their parents' intuitive sense of numbers. Researchers determined that such close result parallels could not have been produced through similar institutional learning backgrounds because their previous research showed that this intuitive sense of numbers is present in infancy.

The findings represent the first evidence of intergenerational transmission of unlearned, nonverbal numerical competence from parents to children. While separate studies have pointed to the existence of intergenerational transmission of cognitive abilities, only a select few have examined parental influences in specific academic domains, such as mathematics.

Libertus said the study is an important step toward understanding the multifaceted parental influences on children's mathematic abilities. Her future studies will examine why this transference of mathematic capability occurs.

"We believe the relationship between a parent and a child's math capabilities could be some combination of hereditary and environmental transmission," said Libertus. "We look forward to future research endeavors that will explicitly examine the degree to which parents pass down key genetic traits and create an in-home learning environment that is conducive to producing high-achieving math students."

For the present study, the math abilities of parents and children were assessed using the appropriate subtests from the Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Achievement, a nationally recognized standardized examination of baseline math ability. Children completed three subtests designed to gauge their capabilities in mathematical computations, basic number-fact recall, and word problems with visual aids. Parents completed a math fluency subtest as a measure of mathematical ability, and they were surveyed on the importance of children developing certain math skills.

The study sampled 54 children between the ages of 5 and 8 as well as 51 parents -- 46 mothers and five fathers -- between the ages of 30 and 59. In terms of racial demographics of participating children, 45 were Caucasian, five biracial, three African American, and one Asian. Forty-six participating parents had at least a college degree, and all possessed at least a high school diploma.

A Pitt faculty member since 2013, Libertus' research focuses on the understanding of how children perceive and learn mathematical concepts. The long-range goals of her work seek to identify key factors in the successful learning of mathematics. Emily J. Braham, a doctoral student with a cognitive-neuroscience concentration in the Department of Psychology, assisted in this research study.

The study "Intergenerational Associations in Numerical Approximation and Mathematical Abilities" is available in the latest edition of Developmental Science.

SOURCE .  The journal  abstract is here






UK: Now they want to outlaw non-violent political groups

A report from the Tony Blair Institute proposes some alarming new forms of censorship.

Our freedom from government interference – our freedom to speak, to campaign and to operate as we please outside of the reach of the state – is under constant assault today. A recent report from the grandly named Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, titled New Policy Responses to Stop Hate Crime, is just the latest example of this.

Its suggestions for further restrictions on what we can say about people’s religion are bad enough, and blur the line between anti-religious speech and blatantly racist speech. But the proposals about hate groups are even more disconcerting. Put bluntly, the report’s complaint is that the government does not have enough powers to make life difficult for organisations that promote views we don’t like, and so it ought to award itself some more.

The problem, as the institute sees it, is this: too many groups, such as Britain First or Generation Identity, promote odious ideas, but remain annoyingly non-violent. Which means they cannot just be summarily banned under current anti-terror legislation that allows for the censorship of violence-inciting speech. The institute’s modest proposal to deal with this alleged difficulty is a ‘new tier of hate-group designation’, which could be proudly announced as the ‘first of its kind in Europe’.

Available by Home Office fiat, such designations would be based on the fairly vague claim that a group might ‘demonise specific groups on the basis of their race, religious [faith], gender, nationality or sexuality’, or be guilty of ‘disproportionately blaming specific groups (based on religion, race, gender or nationality) for broader societal issues’. Or they might be regarded as ‘aligning with extremist ideologies, though not inciting violence’.

What would be the impact on a group that was designated as hateful? The report is short on detail, but it speaks in terms of such groups ‘not [being] allowed to use media outlets or speak at universities’, and not being allowed to ‘engage, work with or for public institutions’. They would be ‘suspended from the electoral roll’. (This is an odd phrase showing, perhaps, evidence of over-hasty writing. Presumably, it means the groups would be deregistered as political parties.) The designated groups would also be banned from holding any public marches at all.

This is all quite mild, the report insists. Group members would still, graciously, be allowed to meet in private. And any new offences to back up the proposed prohibition on hate groups would be ‘civil, not criminal’. Oh, and there would be an incitement to virtue, too. Groups might be given back their privileges, rather like errant schoolboys who showed good behaviour, if they mended their ways and became more enlightened.

Where to start with all this? The first thing to note is that these measures are envisaged as applying to organisations operating entirely within the law. What we are talking about here is the introduction of powers to impose severe restrictions on the activities of lawful groups; groups that are neither violent nor dedicated to criminal activity.

Despite the report’s protestations, the restrictions are severe. Preventing a group from taking part in any procession, excluding it from addressing students and banning it from democratic activity as a political party are essentially telling that group that it may only operate in private.

It gets worse. Consider the words ‘not allowed to use media outlets’. Are broadcasters now to be automatically penalised by Ofcom if they publicise the views of a government-disapproved body? Will we reach the position of old Eastern European dictatorships and punish newspapers for publishing material from specific groups? As for the comforting statement that any offences created would be civil not criminal, don’t be taken in. If anything, this would make it even easier to assert state control over certain political groups, as it would mean that fines could be levied and bans enforced without the need to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

Think about what kind of activity might fall under the ban. What about a Christian evangelical group known for its strong views on transgenderism? Could it be driven from public life until it mended its ways? On the other side, what of pro-choice activists who regularly call out what they see as the medieval bigotry of the Catholic Church on reproductive matters, or a group of gay-rights supporters who attack the Koran for its uncompromising view on homosexuality? Might they be found guilty of disproportionately blaming a religious group for societal ills and find themselves banned?

We need to criticise and challenge proposals like these long before they become law.

SOURCE 






Parents must have the right to spank their kids

Scotland’s ban on smacking is an assault on parental freedom.

Scotland has banned smacking. MSPs decided this afternoon, by a majority of 84 to 29, to make it a criminal offence for parents to discipline their children with a slap. What a nasty, authoritarian decision. This is an outrageous intrusion into the sovereignty of the family and into parents’ freedom to decide for themselves how to raise their children. It is yet another expression of the PC middle classes’ arrogant presumption that they know better than the rest of us how children should be brought up and how households should be run. Anyone who believes in freedom and good parenting should oppose this meddling law.

The quinoa mums and blogging dads who make up the commentariat and the political elite have always looked with snobbish horror at parents who smack. Smacking offends their parenting-manual worldview, in which kids must always be surrounded in cotton wool and must be told every five minutes that they are wonderful individuals, whose self-esteem is the most important thing in the world. To these people discipline itself is bad news. They might occasionally use the naughty step against their offspring, but a clip round the ear? A smack on the bum? A stern word in the ear of the kid who plays up in public? No way. That’s fascism, right?

They look upon working-class, immigrant and religious families that tend to use traditional methods of discipline as criminal, effectively. And now, in Scotland, they will be criminal. The new law forbids even ‘reasonable’ physical force against children. It is called the ‘equal protection’ act because it will give children the same protection from ‘assault’ that adults enjoy. A mum isn’t allowed to walk into Asda and smack an adult who is doing their weekly shop, so why should she be allowed to smack her own kid during a trip to Asda? That’s the infantile thinking behind this insidious ban.

The elitist anti-smacking crusaders make a basic error. They think the smacking of children is assault, that it is an act of violence. It absolutely is not. Parents smack their children out of love, not hate; out of concern for their welfare, not as an attack on their welfare. Yes, some parents beat their children, often badly, and there are laws in place to deal with these acts of violence. But a clip, a tap, a smack or an occasional whack with a slipper are not acts of violence – they are acts of disciplinarian concern and love.

The idea that you aren’t allowed to smack adults and therefore you shouldn’t be allowed to smack children is ridiculous. Adults do many things with children that they would never do with adults. They clean their bums, send them to their room, block adult content from their computers, forbid them from wearing certain clothes. We do these things to children because they are dependants – they need guidance and socialisation and sometimes control. And smacking is, or should be, a perfectly acceptable part of that process.

The anti-smacking zealots and so-called parenting experts claim that kids who get smacked will come to think that violence is an acceptable response to difficult situations. Nonsense. I was smacked. Regularly. I needed it, too. Virtually everyone I knew in the immigrant, working-class community I grew up in was smacked. Did we become violent maniacs? Of course not. In fact, we came to a clear understanding of how one should behave. We learned self-control and respect. Our parents hit us because they loved us and wanted us to be properly socialised as boundary-respecting adults. And they were successful.

Parents should use whatever methods of discipline work best for them and their families. It ought to be none of the state’s business. Scotland is effectively disciplining its own citizens, its own adults, and that is a far more horrible thing than a kid occasionally getting a smack from a parent who loves him.

SOURCE 





Bring back knights and dames, says Tony Abbott

Tony Abbott has stood by his decision to appoint knights and dames into the Australian honours system and suggests they be reintroduced.

In his first long post-election interview to mark the Liberal Party’s 75th anniversary, Mr ­Abbott recognised there were things that caused him “a lot of grief” when he was PM between 2013-15, including his captain’s pick of appointing Prince Philip a Knight.

But Mr Abbott stood by his decision for knights and dames in the Australian honours system, and suggested they be back on the agenda and reinstated.

“If we are going to have an honours system (then) I think that at the apex of the system we should have knights and dames,” Mr Abbott said.

“If you are a tradition-minded leader of a centre-right party, that’s exactly the kind of thing that you should do. At the heart of our centre-right tradition, it is not so much reform but restoration.

“I should have found a way of doing in this country what they did in New Zealand when John Key brought it back (by) up­grading the ACs to AKs. And I shouldn’t have made it the prime minister’s personal pick, it should have been the Council of the Order of Australia which did it.”

In 2014, Mr Abbott announced that up to four knights or dames would be appointed in any year, saying the honour would be extended to Australians of “extraordinary and pre-eminent achievement and merit”. Mr Abbott then appointed Prince Philip a Knight on Australia Day, recognising him for his “contribution to Australia throughout the Queen’s reign.”

However, in 2015 Malcolm Turnbull dumped his predecessor’s system saying his “Cabinet recently considered the Order of Australia, in this its 40th anniversary year, and agreed that Knights and Dames are not appropriate in our modern honours system”.

Mr Turnbull said while knights and dames was “a long way from being the most important issue in Australia”, the decision reflected a modern Australia. “Knights and Dames are titles that are really anachronistic, out of date, [and] not appropriate in 2015 in Australia,” Mr Turnbull said.

In his exclusive interview, Mr Abbott conceded he made mistakes as prime minister but overwhelmingly blamed Mr Turnbull’s overweening ambition for his government’s demise four years ago.

Mr ­Abbott said he wished he had longer than two years as prime minister and did not rule out a ­return to parliament.

“It wasn’t that we had a divided government, it was more that there was one person who was ­determined to get to the top by hook or by crook,” Mr Abbott said. “Malcolm always thought it was his destiny to be prime minister and I happened to be the ­obstacle to that and so he dealt with me as best he could.”

While Mr Abbott said he had “mostly” forgiven those who had turned against him and had no “lasting enmities”, he would consider returning to parliament. “If the Liberal Party ever wanted me to do that, I would be more than happy to consider it, but I find it difficult to imagine the circumstances that they would want me,” he said. “I’m not ruling it out but I’m not expecting it to happen.”

With the Liberal Party having governed nationally for 48 of its 75 years, Mr Abbott said it could reasonably claim to be Australia’s natural party of government.

“No party can represent the country as wholeheartedly as we can,” he said. “First, because no particular section owns us the way the unions own the Labor Party. And, second, because we have not succumbed to the siren song of globalism to anything like the ­extent that the political left has.”

Mr Abbott said the Liberal Party was the custodian of three principal political traditions — liberalism, conservatism and patriotism — but the key to Scott Morrison’s election victory was being more pragmatic than ­ideological.

“There’s the liberal strand, there’s the conservative strand and, above all else, there’s the patriotic strand,” he said about the Liberal Party’s philosophy. “Yes, we are the freedom party, yes we are the tradition party but above all else we are the patriotic party.

“What we always need to do is to ask ourselves what are the ­issues that are troubling people at this time and come up with ­feasible, understandable ways ­forward. We certainly looked the more practical and the less ideological of the two parties at the last election, and that’s why we won.”

The former prime minister, who was a guest at the British Conservative Party conference in Manchester last week, praised US President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson for putting their nations first.

“There has been a much greater sense of the nation state and of good old-fashioned patriotism in the approach of Trump and Trump’s Republicans and in the approach of Johnson and Johnson’s Conservatives,” Mr Abbott said. “I also think that one of the reasons why we succeeded in 2013 was because we had a no-­nonsense approach to border protection which put Australia first.”

SOURCE  

******************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

************************************