Entries for May 23, 2007

The big news on the blogosphere today is a study, reported by LiveScience.com, that found a tentative correlation between finger size and performance on the SAT.

As it turns out, the ratio between a person's index and middle fingers in connected to prenatal hormone levels that also play a role in brain development.

The SAT is unlikely to be scrapped in favor of measuring a person's fingers, but the news comes as yet another question mark as to how effective--and, more important, how fair--the test is in measuring aptitude. Here are three articles from the U.S.News & World Report archives on the evolution and attempts to bring down the storied exam.

Psyching out the SAT, Oct. 9, 1994

The SAT Revolution, Nov. 3, 2002

The New SAT: It's Bigger, But Is It Better? March 6, 2005

A bitter legislative quarrel in the House, played out in the parliamentary vocabulary of reprimands and motions to table, raged on yesterday as the Democrats pushed back a Republican attempt to officially chastise Rep. John Murtha, the combative Pennsylvanian whom Speaker Nancy Pelosi unsuccessfully backed for majority leader after the Democrats won control of the House in November.

As we reported here on May 11, the scuffle started with an early-morning effort by Republicans to kill a controversial pet project in Murtha's district: the National Drug Intelligence Center.

Here's a synopsis of the fight so far:

• Rep. Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican, attempts to strike a $23 million earmark for the center. The effort fails.
• A week later, Rogers says, Murtha storms across the House floor and says to him: "I hope you don't have any earmarks in the defense appropriations bill, because they are gone and you will not get any earmarks now and forever." (Murtha chairs the powerful defense appropriations subcommittee.)
• Rogers introduces a motion to reprimand Murtha for threatening legislative revenge.
• The House tables the motion, effectively killing it, voting almost strictly along party lines.

No word yet on whether the conflict will boil over again when the House breaks for recess.

The distinctly D.C. psychodrama of the fired U.S. attorneys is back in the spotlight today as Monica Goodling, the former White House liaison at the Department of Justice during the time of the firings, testifies today before the House Judiciary Committee.

Ahead of the hearing, the committee released another heap of documents obtained from DOJ, including department correspondences that involves Goodling, who was granted immunity from prosecution in the case in exchange for her testimony. All the documents are available here.

This morning's top stories:

• In a commencement address today, the president is expected to detail newly declassified information that Osama bin Laden has ordered terror attacks outside Iraq, the Associated Press reports.
• Meanwhile, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress are claiming victory in the final Iraq spending bill, which does not mandate troop withdrawal but has some provisions for withholding reconstruction aid if certain security benchmarks are not met.
• A report by the World Conservation Union claims that 35 of Europe's 231 mammal species are in danger of extinction.
• Dubai will be home to the first of a new series of self-sustained buildings that are powered by wind energy, LiveScience.com reports.