Three life-size Buddha statues have just been discovered by Afghan archaeologists at Mes Aynak - one of which is complete and untouched by looters!

The concept of "general intelligence"—the idea that people who are good at one mental task tend to be good at many others—was considered radical in 1904, when Charles Spearman proposed the theory of a "g factor." Today, however, it is among the most replicated findings in psychology. But whereas in 1904 the U.S. economy was a network of farms, mills, and artisans, today's economy is an office-based affair, where the most important g for many companies doesn't stand for general intelligence, but, rather, groups.

So, what makes groups smart? Is there any such thing as a "smart" group, or are groups just, well, clumps of smart people?

As a team of scientists from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Union College write in this Sunday's New York Times, research suggests that just as some individuals are smarter than others, some groups are smarter than others, across a range of tests and tasks. In other words, there is a "c factor" for collective intelligence. Teams that are successful at solving visual puzzles also tend to be good at brainstorming and beating computers in video games. The authors provide a nice summary of the characteristics of smart groups in their original study (not directly linked in the Times piece, but accessible on page 686 of Science, October 2010):

Each year on January 22—the anniversary of the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade—the March for Life draws thousands of protesters to Washington, DC, for what organizers bill as "world's largest anti-abortion event." But this year, there's an added wrinkle: Organizers of the march have spent the past six months arguing that birth control pills are a form of abortion.

March for Life Education and Defense Fund, the nonprofit that organizes the annual protest, identified oral birth control as a form of abortion in a lawsuit filed in July. With the suit, which is ongoing, March for Life is fighting for an exemption from the Affordable Care Act mandate that all private employers provide contraception coverage.

March for Life argues that covering drugs or medical devices that cause abortions would violate its founding principles. And it places hormonal birth control, which includes things like oral contraception and vaginal rings, squarely within that category. In its lawsuit, the group refers to these as "abortifacients," a characterization with which most physicians strongly disagree.

Abstract

In November 2011, the citizens of Mississippi voted down Proposition
26, a “personhood” measure that sought to establish separate constitutional rights
for fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses. This proposition raised the question of
whether such measures could be used as the basis for depriving pregnant women
of their liberty through arrests or forced medical interventions. Over the past four
decades, descriptions of selected subsets of arrests and forced interventions on pregnant
women have been published. Such cases, however, have never been systematically
identified and documented, nor has the basis for the deprivations of liberty been
comprehensively examined. In this article we report on 413 cases from 1973 to 2005
in which a woman’s pregnancy was a necessary factor leading to attempted and actual
deprivations of a woman’s physical liberty. First, we describe key characteristics of
the cases and the women, including socioeconomic status and race. Second, we investigate
the legal claims made to justify the arrests, detentions, and forced interventions.
Third, we explore the role played by health care providers. We conclude by discussing
the implications of our findings and the likely impact of personhood measures on
pregnant women’s liberty and on maternal, fetal, and child health.