What can be done to reduce stereotype threat?

Beliefs about the nature of ability influences a host of variables including motivation and achievement in the face of challenge or difficulty. Some individuals tend to believe that intelligence is fixed, not changing over time or across contexts (an “entity theory”). Because they believe that ability is fixed, entity theorists are highly concerned with messages and outcomes that supposedly reflect their “true” abilities (Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Dweck & Sorich, 1999). When facing challenges, entity theorists tend to demonstrate lowered focus and task avoidance. Others tend to view intelligence as a quality that can be developed and that it changes across contexts or over time (an “incremental theory”). Incremental theorists tend to

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Eh what? Is it 2009? Rita Panahi seems to be stuck in a time warp.

THOSE on the lunatic fringe who live in fear of a Muslim invasion have a new threat to keep them up at night — and this one is real. There’s a new “religion” on the rise whose band of non-believers is becomingly increasingly bold, some would say militant, in not only pushing its own belief system but actively trying to shut down dissenting views.

New? A new religion on the rise? Calling outspoken atheism “militant” is about as new as the hula hoop.

Atheism is no longer just a quiet and personal celebration of reason, it has grown into a movement that is employing some

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Ed had open heart surgery a few days ago.

The good news is that I have health insurance, which I pay on a COBRA from my job with AINN (it runs out in six months and I’ll have to get my own insurance, which thankfully can’t be denied anymore because of the preexisting condition). But I’m still going to have some significant out-of-pocket expenses and loss of income during the recovery period (it’s going to be a couple months before I’m really back to normal). So you can certainly help out financially if you have the means to do so and it would be greatly appreciated. You can donate through Paypal (if neither of these work below, just go to

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Oy, here we go again – the Daily Mail is reporting on Dawkins’s 2006 “fear of hell is worse than mild abuse” claim, all over again, as if it hadn’t just been beaten to death again only a month ago, and as if it hadn’t started on its career of being beaten to death way back in 2006.

Raising your children as Roman Catholics is  worse than child abuse, according to militant atheist Richard  Dawkins.

In typically incendiary style, Professor  Dawkins said the mental torment inflicted by the religion’s teachings is worse  in the long-term than any sexual abuse carried out by priests.

He said he had been told by a woman that  while being abused by a

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He talks the usual holistic bollocks, which the newspapers duly solemnly repeat for him.

The Prince Of Wales called today for a health service that recognises “the core human elements of mind, body and spirit” as well as treating disease.

Charles said health professionals should develop a “healing empathy” to “listen and honour what is being said and not said by patients” so they can find their own way towards better health.

Writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, he set out a vision of healthcare that includes “the physical and social environment, education, agriculture and architecture”.

Writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine? How does someone with no medical or scientific training of … Read the rest

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If the New York Times notices…

IMAGINE walking into the toy department and noticing several distinct aisles. In one, you find toys packaged in dark brown and black, which include the “Inner-City Street Corner” building set and a “Little Rapper” dress-up kit. In the next aisle, the toys are all in shades of brown and include farm-worker-themed play sets and a “Hotel Housekeeper” dress.

If toys were marketed solely according to racial and ethnic stereotypes, customers would be outraged, and rightfully so. Yet every day, people encounter toy departments that are rigidly segregated — not by race, but by gender. There are pink aisles, where toys revolve around beauty and domesticity, and blue aisles filled with toys related to

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The Huffington Post puts numbers to what I was saying the other day about the cumulative Newtowns that don’t get the kind of attention that Newtown got.

Police reports about the final moments of Demetrius Cruz’s life include the kind of information that is at once difficult to fathom and yet somehow part of the ordinary but tragic tapestry of life in the U.S.

Cruz was riding in a car with his cousin on a Denver street Saturday when the driver of a white car started bumping, following and then chasing the teens’ car. Cruz called his aunt. He was scared. Someone in the white car fired several shots, striking and killing Cruz. He was just 15 years old. That

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This is entertaining. I was browsing through stuff trying to recall previous disagreements with Shermer (I know I’ve had some, though only unilateral ones) and I found a post of Jerry Coyne’s from more than three years ago. It’s about Shermer as accommodationist.

Amusingly, I start by arguing that Shermer can be read as describing a view rather than endorsing it. Funny, isn’t it! Since now I’m getting shouted at for confusing the two in the case of “it’s more of a guy thing.”

Then there’s the whole pragmatism question.

 

• PZ Myers Posted November 28, 2009 at 12:29 pm | Permalink

  Shermer is a bit weird on this topic. At the Beyond Belief conference a few years ago,

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And there’s the eagerly-awaited press conference where Wayne LaPierre of the NRA explained why it’s desperately urgent that there be hundreds of millions more assault weapons in the hands of everyone.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A.’s vice president, at a packed media event was interrupted twice by protesters demanding tougher gun controls.

No, that’s wrong. The thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, much more safely and in time, is not letting him get one in the first place.

Angry and combative, Mr. LaPierre, who has led the N.R.A.’s operations for two decades, complained that the news media had unfairly

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The National Review Online has figured out what went wrong at Sandy Hook school. It was too feminized! There weren’t any men around!! Feminist witch hunts!!!

Charlotte Allen makes the case:

There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers.

And men aren’t, because they’re … Read the rest

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Now I know why I got such an unusual number of first-time commenters on my post about Shermer on subliminal influences yesterday, all of them wrong about what I’d said. It’s because Shermer did a Facebook post about it, in which he completely missed my point.

That’s partly my fault; I didn’t spell it out. As usual, I wrote for regular readers, who would get the implications. That saves a lot of tedium for the regular readers, but it can confuse others.

Nevertheless – I think Shermer’s response is a good deal nastier than it needed to be. (I note, again, that he didn’t email me to ask for clarification. I note, again, that he has never directly … Read the rest

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That’s probably why Dave Silverman is on Hannity tonight, which he is.

Anyway – yessssssssss. AA is suing the IRS.

American Atheists and two co-plaintiffs today filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Kentucky a lawsuit demanding that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) stop giving preferential treatment to churches and religious organizations via the process of receiving non-profit tax-exempt status under the Internal Revue Code (IRC) procedures and definitions.

“American Atheists receives tax-exempt status under Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3),” said American Atheists President David Silverman, “but because the organization is not classified as religious it costs American Atheists, along with all other secular non-profits, significantly more money each year to keep that status. In this lawsuit,

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The thing about the NPR think piece on theodicy that was really annoying was the foregone conclusion that it doesn’t make any difference.

I knew that was going to be the conclusion as soon as whoever it was introduced it. I knew what was going to be said, and I knew what wasn’t going to be said. I knew they would say the obvious – god; all-knowing and good; bad things; Newtown. I knew they would get clerics to knot their brows. And I knew that would be that. Next story, then the pause to thank the MacArthur foundation.

I knew there would be not a trace of a genuine recognition that there’s a disconnect here, and that it matters, … Read the rest

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Another item we need to sign. I saw this one via Waleed Al-Husseini’s Facebook page.

To: Secretary-General of the UN
CC :  – Amnesty International  – Front Line Defenders – Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) – Human Rights Watch

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Raef Badawi, a Saudi who is one of the establishers of the “Liberal Saudi Network”, which angered Ultra-orthodox clerics of Saudi-arabia could be beheaded soon for a claimed “apostasy” if no action is taken.

The news in Arabic about this issue is numerous, in English it has not got good attention till now, however, this piece of news has been published by AFP:  “A Saudi court on Monday referred a rights activist to

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