I found this article interesting – new research suggests that exposure to the absurd or irrational may provoke higher levels of thinking – for example, pattern recognition – in humans.  The theory appears to be that when confronted with input which breaches the predictive model that our brains have established, we go into overdrive seeking [...]

I really enjoyed “Music That Makes You Dumb“, an admittedly psuedo-scientific analysis of intelligence vs musical preferences.  Basically, one Virgil Griffith has assembled data on music taste based on U.S. college campuses, then compared that data with the high school scores required to get into each college to produce an assessment of the correlation between [...]

This has to be less than ideal as a precedent for civil liberties in schools.  Another sign of a fundamental shift in our attitude to the presumption of innocence in the 21st Century, perhaps?

The Age reports on the pressing issue of the growth of independent schools teaching from a faith-based curriculum in Australia.  Presenting religious indoctrination in the Howard era clothing of “choice”, some such schools are teaching creationism in science classes and directly counteracting government efforts to provide sex education to students.
For example, the principal of one [...]

The always interesting Possum Comitatus has some analysis of voting trends and social factors at the last federal election. Tucked away in there are some very interesting graphs about religion and its correlation to several other variables (about half way down, look for “Update 2“).
In particular, two relationships stand out:

atheism is proportional to growth [...]

I enjoyed this article about the teaching of physics to school children in the United Kingdom, and reforms which seem to be focused on teaching kids to talk “about” science rather that teaching kids science itself.
Perhaps the most startling point is that calculation has been removed from the physics syllabus. Everything must be [...]

This was in the Oz today: British teachers are allegedly avoiding teaching their students about the Holocaust and the Crusades because this might offend Muslim sensibilities:
These kids are told at home or by Muslim preachers that the Holocaust never happened. Teachers aren’t challenging that misinformation, they’re shutting up so as not to disturb a world [...]

A bit out of date now, but in February it emerged that the University of Sydney has agreed to ban stem cell research at a new facility built on land it acquired from a Catholic residential college.
According to the ABC:
The church’s deed on the land stipulates there should be no foetal stem cell research or [...]