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Cross-sectional age-skill profiles suggest that cognitive skills start declining by age 30 if not earlier. If accurate, such age-driven skill losses pose a major threat to the human capital of societies with rapidly aging populations. We estimate actual age-skill profiles from individual changes in literacy and numeracy skills at different ages. We use the unique German longitudinal component of the Programme of the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC-L) that retested a large representative sample of adults after 3.5 years. Our empirical approach separates age from cohort effects and corrects for measurement error from reversion to the mean. Two main results emerge. First, average skills increase strongly into the forties before decreasing slightly in literacy and more strongly in numeracy. Second, skills decline at older ages only for those with below-average skill usage. White-collar and higher-educated workers with above-average usage show increasing skills even beyond their forties. Women have larger skill losses at older age, particularly in numeracy.

The problem with that warning is peer review guards against nothing.

by Sabine Hossenfelder a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies.

http://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/

Totally awesome program.

has 700+ videos on YouTube covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, and finance

way to squeeze oil and gas from just about anything

bringing text compression within 1% of the threshold for artificial intelligence. Achieving 1.319 bits per character, this makes the next winner of the Hutter Prize likely to reach the threshold of human performance (between 0.6 and 1.3 bits per character

The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. Everything was a little bit ambiguous -- they weren't smart enough to understand what was meant by "rigor." They were faking it.

See with your tongue. Navigate with your skin. Fly by the seat of your pants (literally). How researchers can tap the plasticity of the brain to hack our 5 senses — and build a few new ones.

Why Europeans are getting taller and taller—and Americans aren’t.

A contrarian view of the environmental changes

an entirely new class of material that can be used to build lighter, stronger versions of anything.

One heck of a group photo:http://reddit.com/info/brjl/comments

use Phages instead of anti-biotics...

Scientist pours molten metal into ant nests (w/ pictures)

Who has saved more human lives than anyone else in history? Who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970? Who still teaches at Texas A&M at the age of 86? The answer is Norman Borlaug.

Seventh graders describe scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab.

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise.