the baby boomers hang on? 
 
hilarious clip on peer review 
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VRBWLpYCPY

the tech used to reconstruct the fossil seems miraculous.. but then what do I know?

Turn off the net and at once you would create a horde of bored, intelligent people who would probably march to DC. The net makes free time that much more valuable. good discussion thread sparked by interesting question.. and no, I wont be bored with leisure time.. my work is interesting with some intelligent and creative folks and I do have reasonable amount of leisure but I would segment it differently if I had complete control over my time.

Isn't the most expensive coffee made of seeds from the roasted feces of Indonesian civet cats? Apparently it has a wonderful aroma.

zoho dot com is ad free and completely self sustaining, churns out features/products at a breathtaking rate. It is a web 2 service that avoided this doomed business model. Yet it remains free for personal use, only charging for group (business) use.

is psychology part of social science?

It could be due to differential responding to a few extreme tail events (that can cause death but with the right action can be averted); like having nitroglycerine at hand and using it when needed.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=dna 
 
the value of WA is in exposing large data sets, it appears.

Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine. It computes results if (i) it can interpret the query and (ii) it has relevant curated data.

thanks.

Isn't this the dual of why information that someone may be genetically predisposed to be less than average intelligence would be useful? In a family where most are at 120+, arrival of a child that is well below average (dull, say with potential of 90 adult IQ) but not obviously retarded can be very useful. Instead of throwing good money after bad (kumon classes?) that the child does not benefit from (but obtains a seriously negative self concept), it may be wise to focus on things that the child is able to excel relatively on and also individualized instruction to cope with dullness (such as strategies to work with a limited working memory capacity in mastering simple arithmetic). This sort of thing is already done in some societies via educational streaming at the completion of the sixth grade (into 2 categories in Singapore).  
 
If the deterioration of intelligence with age can be predicted genetically, that would be useful for much the same reasons. Its a piece of information that is very useful to help adapt to the world in the future by those who have been dealt an unkind deck and don't see it coming. 
 
Regarding the original question: Don't the people who run "gifted" programs have the answer? Although their programs are always the first to go on the chopping block.

Singapore's success depends a lot on a cool indoor climate and the (relative) absence of bugs. Lee Kuan Yew embraced air conditioning and cleared out the swamp lands in Singapore. All work places and schools are climate controlled. The same is true in most places in hot and humid Asia where high IQ work is being done. Without air conditioning, they are toast.

the direct link is 
 
http://www.thersa.org/acrobat/rsa_drugs_report.pdf

Alex 
 
Nice summary. It is quite remarkable that only ONE common factor has emerged so consistently. By Contrast, in the domain of trait personality, 5 (or slightly fewer) factors have been proferred.  
 
For the multiple factors to work ONE other factor that has comparable utility/range would need to be found. I haven't heard of any such. 
 
Have modern societal institutions amplified the importance of g and this rise still hasnt peaked? 
 
Of the personality factors, dominance and conscientiousness seem importance to success (although the former less so than previously?). How strongly are they related to g?

Inclusion of country diluted the effect considerably as reported below.. 10% significance level for a large sample? The Height effect was quite robust comparitively. 
 
Of particular interest are the effects of skin color and height on wages. Those with 
darker skin color earn less, and those who are taller earn more, even controlling for 
extensive labor market characteristics, ethnicity, race, and country of origin. The effect of 
skin color on wages is statistically significant at the 1 percent level in columns 1 and 2 
and indicates that an additional unit of skin color darkness on the 11-point scale lowers 
wage by about 1.5 percent. Note that the magnitude is almost identical to but of opposite 
sign to the effect of years of education on wages, which is measured in units similar to 
skin color. Note also that inclusion of indicators for ethnicity and race has only a small 
impact on the negative effect of darker skin color on wages. The inclusion of country of 
birth in addition to ethnicity and race in column 3 reduces the skin color effect to slightly more than half the original magnitude, with the coefficient statistically significant at the 
10 percent level in a 2-sided test. The positive effect of height on wages consistently 
shows a wage advantage of about 1 percent with every additional inch of height, 
significant at the 1 percent level in all specifications. 
 

Inclusion of this variable in the wage equation indicates that those with darker skin color relative to the average in their country of birth actually had slightly higher, not lower, wages. The wage equation estimates continue to show the negative effect of darker skin color level on wages persisted. 
 
So there were 2 variables.. one is skin color relative to country mean skin color and other is absolute skin color. The claim is that the latter effect isnt affected by inclusion of the former.

Even though it is presented as a linear effect, there could be a threshold operating.. maybe closer to the darker end than the lighter end? Which then begs the question. Whence the threshold? 
 
Given the 80-20 rule.. probably most of the effect is in some subset of occupations. Which ones? Things like coding ought not to matter. Probably it matters more for the more people oriented stuff (marketing, management?)

-- 
16-40 bits/second of conscious processing, 11 million bits/second of unconscious processing.  
-- 
 
these are totally adhoc numbers.. So the unconscious is processing a million times more bits? Why not a billion or a thousand? The metric (bit) is decidely vague.

so the hard problem is something bogus cooked up by philosophers? Is that the consensus here?

update 
 
I last worked on classification trees in the early 90s and wrote a couple of papers then on a technique called clique optimization.. I havent done anything in that area since or kept up. I did write the code in ansi c (last mod in 1993) and was able to compile to windows (so it should compile on *ix)  
 
I randomly picked 500 cases from one of the data sets and computed a city block similarity metric based on the four vars named Information something or the other in the dataset with 8400 odd cases. I suspected this was the filtered info.  
 
I wasnt sure what would happen as I hadnt the faintest idea if what I did made any sense (from genetics pov).. Surprise.. the data is a beautiful parsimonious ultrametric hierarchy (i.e. a rooted tree) with 4 or 5 levels and accounts for most of the variance in the similarity metric. 
 
The first level had about 7 groups.. maybe a few of these are singletons.. so the number of real groups is probably less and this level alone accounts for more than 50% of the variance.. 
 
and the overall correlation with just 4 levels in the tree is an astounding 0.93.. 
 
I can email the zip (it is small) someplace for those who want to interpret the data.. If you use the DOS edit.exe you can see the ASCII high chars used to draw the tree. I am busy with other stuff right now and will take a closer look later.

is the raw data for these genetic distances available? The grouping into 5 may not be arbitrary in the sense of a p value but more defensible.. eg.. the partition that maximizes a fit statistic. 
 
I am not a geneticist but sure would like to run the 3000x3000 matrix on this algorithm.