In India's north, the worst place to be born a girl

Amelia Gentleman writes in IHT

A five-hour drive along ill-maintained roads from Lucknow, the capital of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, the surrounding district of Shravasti is, according to calculations by Unicef, the worst place in India to be born a girl.

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The ambivalence that women here feel toward their daughters is rooted in the traditional Indian marriage system, which dictates, first, that girls leave the homes of their parents permanently on their wedding day for their new husband's family and, second, that they do so accompanied by a large dowry.

In private, the village women explain that the mothers' sense of resentment toward their newborn girls comes as the result of a hard financial calculation.

The Secret to Raising Smart Kids

Carol S. Dweck writes in SciAm

• Many people assume that superior intelligence or ability is a key to success. But more than three decades of research shows that an overemphasis on intellect or talent—and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed—leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn.
• Teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, produces high achievers in school and in life.
• Parents and teachers can engender a growth mind-set in children by praising them for their effort or persistence (rather than for their intelligence), by telling success stories that emphasize hard work and love of learning, and by teaching them about the brain as a learning machine.

Downgraded to pop psychology level

Patricia Cohen writes in NY times
PSYCHOANALYSIS and its ideas about the unconscious mind have spread to every nook and cranny of the culture from Salinger to “South Park,” from Fellini to foreign policy. Yet if you want to learn about psychoanalysis at the nation’s top universities, one of the last places to look may be the psychology department.

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The humanities and social sciences have welcomed psychoanalysis without caveats. But the report complains of the wide gulf between the academic’s and the psychoanalyst’s approach and vocabulary, which has made their respective applications of Freud’s theories virtually unrecognizable to each other.

Scholars in the liberal arts have tended to use Freud as a springboard to examine issues and ideas never dreamt of in his philosophy — like gender studies, post-colonial studies, French postmodernism, Queer theory and so on.

Faithfully Confused

Cosmologist Paul Davies in his NY Times op-ed seems to be confused with faith. Here is the response by others in scientific community.

Interviewing America's one of the brainiest couple

Salon interviews America's one of the brainiest couple (Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein)