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Eyewitness Testimony Can Be Tragically Mistaken
LiveScience: Last night's execution of convicted murderer Troy Davis reportedly sent those convinced of Davis' innocence into hysterics. One of their concerns — that eyewitness testimony in the case had been recanted — also concerns cognitive scientists. "This is not the first time a person is pretty much convicted based on eyewitness testimony and circumstantial evidence," said Jason Chan, assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State University, adding that the number of eyewitnesses who later recanted their testimony was "relatively unusual." Seven of nine witnesses who implicated Davis in the shooting of a police officer recanted their testimonies.
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Single-Sex Education Is Assailed in Report
The New York Times: Single-sex education is ineffective, misguided and may actually increase gender stereotyping, a paper to be published Friday asserts. The report, “The Pseudoscience of Single Sex Schooling,” to be published in Science magazine by eight social scientists who are founders of the nonprofit American Council for CoEducational Schooling, is likely to ignite a new round of debate and legal wrangling about the effects of single-sex education. It asserts that “sex-segregated education is deeply misguided and often justified by weak, cherry-picked or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence.” Read the whole story: The New York Times
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Dyslexia independent of IQ
MIT News: About 5 to 10 percent of American children are diagnosed as dyslexic. Historically, the label has been assigned to kids who are bright, even verbally articulate, but who struggle with reading — in short, whose high IQs mismatch their low reading scores. On the other hand, reading troubles in children with low IQs have traditionally been considered a byproduct of their general cognitive limitations, not a reading disorder in particular. Now, a new brain-imaging study challenges this understanding of dyslexia. “We found that children who are poor readers have the same brain difficulty in processing the sounds of language whether they have a high or low IQ,” says John D. E.
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Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change
London Evening Standard: Redirect provides an intelligent person's introduction to psychology, a field that gives rise to more quackery and charlatanism than almost any other. That alone makes it worth reading. The fact that it is accessible, engaging and consistently WTF-worthy makes it an instant classic of popular science - and its lessons could scarcely be more timely. Timothy D Wilson, an American who literally wrote the textbook on social psychology, has a scientist's pernicketiness about evidence-based research but a writer's gift for distilling its latest findings into everyday language.
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Rambert Dance Company: Dance cosies up to science
The Telegraph: The gap between science and the humanities, as identified in C P Snow’s celebrated lecture The Two Cultures, has in recent years been conscientiously bridged: Ian McEwan writes a novel about global warming, while Brian Cox popularises physics for the layman. Somewhat surprisingly, however, it is in the field of contemporary dance that science has become seriously voguish. Last year, Wayne McGregor’s FAR fashioned movement out of ideas from the Age of Enlightenment, while in 2009 David Bintley’s E=mc² took on the theory of relativity. Not exactly Romeo and Juliet.
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Study: Single-sex education may do more harm than good
The Washington Post: The push for more single-sex instruction in public schools is based on weak, “misconstrued” scientific claims rather than solid research and may do more harm than good, according to a study published in the journal Science on Thursday.
