Learning
Gray Divorce: Higher standards, more opportunities, longer lives, women at work help explain the trend
One reason for this is what we might call the divorce echo effect. Older individuals are more often in remarriages, not first marriages, and remarriages have long been more likely than first marriages to end through divorce. People who have been divorced in the past are more willing to divorce again in the event a marriage becomes unsatisfying. In contrast, some proportion of those in first marriages are unwilling to divorce even if they have an unsatisfying marriage. more »
Birds Do It, Bees Do It: A Century of Sex (Mis)Education in the United States
From junior high school hygiene films to websites, public health campaigns, scientific studies, children’s books, bodice-ripper novels and (sometimes) parents, Americans have always found ways to learn about sex. While attitudes towards sex education swing from the blissfulness of ignorance to the empowerment of liberation — and back again — every generation finds new ways to answer the old questions. Our desire to learn about desire has not changed. more »
Flu Predictions From Columbia's Mailman School of Health & the CDC ... The Season Is Upon Us
Website features: Interactive map of the United States that displays the relative severity of seasonal flu in 94 cities across the country; flu and incidence numbers for each. Influenza incidence predictions by city for the coming weeks; map that illustrates the proportion of flu cases by region. more »
A Scout Report: ABT (Ballet), Bunraku, Nate Silver, Cuba in Revolution and The Search for Extraterrestial Life
The Great Debate features a video of a public debate between renowned SETI scientist, Dan Werthimer, and skeptic, Geoff Marcy. Each side presents evidence for why we should - or shouldn't - believe that there really are other advanced civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy..."As we search for a universal language to communicate with civilizations beyond Earth, where should we start? Math? Pictures? Something else?" ... The American Ballet Theatre was founded in New York in 1939 by a group of dancers, choreographers, and producers enthralled with the magnetic Russian-born ballet master, Mikhail Mordkin...538 is a punchy online magazine that dissects sports, politics, economics, science, and other topics using a numbers-crunching lens more »