The Flynn effect has always been tinged with mystery. First popularized by the political scientist James Flynn, the effect refers to the widespread increase in IQ scores over time. Some measures of intelligence — such as performance on Raven’s Progressive Matrices in Des Moines and Scotland — have been increasing for at least 100 years. What’s most peculiar is how scores have increased:
1) Scores have increased the most on the problem-solving portion of intelligence tests.
2) Verbal intelligence has remained relatively flat, while non-verbal scores continue to rise.
3) Performance gains have occurred across all age groups.
4) The rise in scores exists primarily on those tests with content that does not appear to be easily learned.
Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.
Charlie Miller, a respected security researcher, has discovered vulnerabilities in the smart batteries for Apple laptops and mobile devices; he can manipulate their firmware to render them unusable or to cause them to misreport their remaining charge to the OS. The new firmware can survive an OS replacement, leading Miller to speculate that it could be used to store persistent malware that restored itself after the disk was erased and the OS was rewritten.
