One of the more interesting pieces of evidence in the nature or nurture debate is the that athletes on professional sports teams tend to have a higher proportion of players born early in the year. Malcolm Gladwell documented this phenomenon for ice hockey players in his book Outliers. The basic idea is that when young, those born earlier in the year are bigger and faster than their peers and, as a result, tend to get more game time, are selected for further development and so on.

Over the last few weeks, Bryan Caplan of Econlog has engaged in a debate with his former teacher Bill Dickens over the social value of education. Brian’s position is that education is largely used for signalling rather than skill acquisition. While some signalling is good (matches students and employers), it is privately optimal to far exceed the social optimal. This excessive signalling consumes resources for limited social return, so we should stop subsidising it and possibly consider taxing it.

Following from my recent post on marshmallows and impatience, I have come across the following article by Dohmen et al. It was found that lower cognitive ability was associated with risk aversion and impatience.

I have gone through the back catalogue of podcasts for WNYC’s Radiolab for a couple of months now. I got into it after ABC radio substituted it for the Science Show for two weeks in late June. It is sensational – great content and entertaining. I just listened to the Radiolab podcast on Walter Mischel’s marshmallow experiment . The basic idea of the experiment concerned testing the ability of four-year olds to delay gratification.

Last week, ABC’s Catalyst had a story on skateboarders taking extra risks based on the presence of an attractive researcher. This was based on article published earlier in the year (Ronay, R. & von Hippel, W. (2010). The presence of an attractive woman elevates testosterone and physical risk-taking in young men. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 1, 57-64). I haven’t been able to access the article yet, but in the Catalyst story, von Hippel proposed that it could be explained through the role risk taking plays as a signal of fitness.