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Parents of girls are 5 percent more likely to divorce than parents of boys. Economists first analyzed the data that way in 2003, when Gordon Dahl at the University of Rochester and Enrico Moretti at U.C.L.A., identified that gap, and noted that it widened as you added boys or girls to a family. Parents of three girls, for instance, are 10 percent more likely to split than are parents of three boys. And, they found, an unmarried couple is more likely to marry if they learn their unborn child will be a boy than a girl.

Fascinating.

"Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: "If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn't want us to know, can you do that? " Multimedia How to Break the Cookie Habit This article is adapted from "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business," which will be published on Feb. 28. More in the Magazine » Readers' Comments Share your thoughts. Post a Comment » Read All Comments (35) » Pole has a master's degree in statistics and another in economics, and has been obsessed with the intersection of data and human behavior most of his life. His parents were teachers in North Dakota, and while other kids were going to 4-H, Pole was doing algebra and writing computer programs. "The stereotype of a math nerd is true," he told me when I spoke with him last year. "I kind of like going out and evangelizing analytics." As the marketers explained to Pole - and as Pole later explained to me, back when we were still speaking and before Target told him to stop - new parents are a retailer's holy grail. Most shoppers don't buy everything they need at one store. Instead, they buy groceries at the grocery store and toys at the toy store, and they visit Target only when they need certain items they associate with Target - cleaning supplies, say, or new socks or a six-month supply of toilet paper. But Target sells everything from milk to stuffed animals to lawn furniture to electronics, so one of the company's primary goals is convincing customers that the only store they need is Target. But it's a tough message to get across, even with the most ingenious ad campaigns, because once consumers' shopping habits are ingrained, it's incredibly difficult to change them. There are, however, some brief periods in a person's life when old routines fall apart and

Parenting sites indicate many New York City parents want caregivers to teach their children a language.

Some interesting questions as to whether parents can "know" it's a good thing or a bad thing to have their children learn a second language. There are clearly cognitive and social costs and benefits that must be weighed.

"Any love-hate relationship must have its share of pain, so the academic world, in its obsession with college rankings, is suitably dismayed by news that an elite college, Claremont McKenna, fudged its numbers in an apparent bid to climb the charts. Claremont McKenna in California is the latest but not the only college to have admitted submitting false information in an effort to win a high rating. Dismayed, but not quite surprised. In fact, several colleges in recent years have been caught gaming the system - in particular, the avidly watched U.S. News & World Report rankings - by twisting the meanings of rules, cherry-picking data or just lying. In one recent example, Iona College in New Rochelle, north of New York City, acknowledged last fall that its employees had lied for years not only about test scores, but also about graduation rates, freshman retention, student-faculty ratio, acceptance rates and alumni giving. Other institutions have found ways to manipulate the data without outright dishonesty. In 2008, Baylor University offered financial rewards to admitted students to retake the SAT in hopes of increasing its average score. Admissions directors say that some colleges delay admission of low-scoring students until January, excluding them from averages for the class admitted in September, while other colleges seek more applications to report a lower percentage of students accepted. Claremont McKenna, according to Robert Morse, the director of data research at U.S. News, is "the highest-ranking school to have to go through this publicly and have to admit to misreporting." This year, U.S. News rated it as the nation's ninth-best liberal arts college. There is no reason to think the U.S. News rankings are rife with misinformation, and the publication makes efforts to police the data, adjust its metrics and close loopholes. But repeated revelations of manipulation show the importance of the rankings in the minds of prospective students, thei

"As a fitness coach in Grand Rapids, Mich., Doreen Bolhuis has a passion for developing exercises for children. The younger, it seems, the better. "With the babies in our family," she said, "I start working them out in the hospital." Ms. Bolhuis turned her exercises into a company, Gymtrix, that offers a library of videos starting with training for babies as young as 6 months. There is no lying in the crib playing with toes. Infant athletes, accompanied by doting parents on the videos, do a lot of jumping, kicking and, in one exercise, something that looks like baseball batting practice. "We hear all the time from families that have been with us, 'Our kids are superstars when they're in middle school and they get into sports,' " Ms. Bolhuis said. Future Robinson Canos and Sidney Crosbys are getting their start in sports earlier than ever. Kindergartners play in soccer leagues and at an annual T-Ball World Series in Milton, Fla. But now children are being groomed as athletes before they can walk. The growing competition in marketing baby sports DVDs includes companies with names like athleticBaby and Baby Goes Pro. Even experts in youth sports seem startled that the age of entry has dipped so low. "That's really amazing. What's next?" said Dr. Lyle Micheli, an orthopedic surgeon and founder of the first pediatric sports medicine clinic in the United States at Children's Hospital in Boston. Dr. Micheli said he did not see any great advantages in exposing babies to sports. "I don't know of any evidence that training at this infancy stage accelerates coordination," he said. One of his concerns, he said, is "the potential for even younger ages of overuse injury." Bob Bigelow, a former National Basketball Association player and a critic of competitive sports for young children, is also skeptical. "This is Baby Mozart stuff; you play Mozart for the baby in utero and it comes out some sort of fine arts major," he said. �

Once, experts feared that young children exposed to more than one language would suffer "language confusion," which might delay their speech development. Today, parents often are urged to capitalize on that early knack for acquiring language. Upscale schools market themselves with promises of deep immersion in Spanish - or Mandarin - for everyone, starting in kindergarten or even before. Yet while many parents recognize the utility of a second language, families bringing up children in non-English-speaking households, or trying to juggle two languages at home, are often desperate for information. And while the study of bilingual development has refuted those early fears about confusion and delay, there aren't many research-based guidelines about the very early years and the best strategies for producing a happily bilingual child. But there is more and more research to draw on, reaching back to infancy and even to the womb. As the relatively new science of bilingualism pushes back to the origins of speech and language, scientists are teasing out the earliest differences between brains exposed to one language and brains exposed to two. Researchers have found ways to analyze infant behavior - where babies turn their gazes, how long they pay attention - to help figure out infant perceptions of sounds and words and languages, of what is familiar and what is unfamiliar to them. Now, analyzing the neurologic activity of babies' brains as they hear language, and then comparing those early responses with the words that those children learn as they get older, is helping explain not just how the early brain listens to language, but how listening shapes the early brain. Recently, researchers at the University of Washington used measures of electrical brain responses to compare so-called monolingual infants, from homes in which one language was spoken, to bilingual infants exposed to two languages. Of course, since the subjects of the study, adorable in their

"All day long, people have been telling me about an article headlined: "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior." And I've had enough! I'm posting my reaction so that I don't have to keep talking about it. Getting to the point: the piece is crap. But its writer, Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua, is also a marketing genius. Let me explain…."

"VANDALS have struck a painting that depicts South African President Jacob Zuma with his genitals hanging out. Two men defaced the picture with gobs of paint, as Mr Zuma and his African National Congress sought a court order yesterday to have the painting removed from an art gallery. The case is spiced with freedom of expression on the one hand and the right to dignity on the other. It took centre stage after the painting by Brett Murray went on display in a Johannesburg gallery this month and was reported on in local media. Mr Zuma, who has a reputation for promiscuity, took the depiction of him with his private parts exposed very personally and compared himself to a rape victim. Mr Zuma himself was put on trial for rape, and acquitted, in 2006. "The portrayal has ridiculed and caused me humiliation and indignity," Mr Zuma contended in an affidavit filed yesterday with the South Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg. Presiding over the hearing in a courtroom a few kilometres from the gallery, Judge Fayeeza Kathree-Setiloane said the full three-judge bench should hear the case because the national interest and constitutional issues are at stake. South Africa's constitution protects the right to dignity as well as to freedom of expression. She said the hearing would recommence tomorrow. Mr Zuma and the ANC sought to have the painting, titled "The Spear," removed from the Goodman Gallery and to stop the newspaper City Press from displaying a photo of it on its website. Just before the hearing was scheduled to begin, two men wielding cans of red and black paint calmly walked up to the painting hanging on a gallery wall and took turns defacing it. "Now it's completely and utterly destroyed," said Iman Rappetti, a reporter for a South African TV channel who happened to be on the scene at the time as her camera rolled. Her channel showed a man in a tweed jacket painting a red X over the president's genital area and then his face. Next, a man in a hoodie smeared bl

"Los Angeles Unified officials hope a new plan allowing students to purchase school meals with a simple press of a finger will save money, speed up long cafeteria lines and reduce the headaches caused by forgotten lunch money. But the controversial finger scan ID system, already tested and dropped by at least one school district in California and banned in some states, has faced opposition from parents and civil liberties groups worried about student privacy. "Making school children submit to fingerprinting, and risking the misuse of biometric information before they are old enough to drive a car seems like an absurdly risky and invasive way to get slightly faster lunch lines," said Peter Bibring, a lawyer with the Southern California American Civil Liberties Union. "

"LOS ANGELES (October 20, 2010) - The Parents Television Council™ denounced the makers of the TV show "Glee" for a hyper-sexualized GQ photo shoot that will be featured in the November issue. "Glee" airs on Tuesdays at 8:00 pm ET/PT (7:00 pm CT/MT) on Fox. "It is disturbing that GQ, which is explicitly written for adult men, is sexualizing the actresses who play high school-aged characters on 'Glee' in this way. It borders on pedophilia. Sadly, this is just the latest example of the overt sexualization of young girls in entertainment," said PTC President Tim Winter. "Many children who flocked to 'High School Musical' have grown into 'Glee' fans. They are now being treated to seductive, in-your-face poses of the underwear-clad female characters posing in front of school lockers, one of them opting for a full-frontal crotch shot. By authorizing this kind of near-pornographic display, the creators of the program have established their intentions on the show's direction. And it isn't good for families."

"Keith Olbermann, the leading liberal voice on American television in the age of Obama, was suspended Friday after his employer, MSNBC, discovered he made campaign contributions to three Democrats last month. The indefinite suspension was a stark display of the clash between objectivity and opinion in television journalism. While Mr. Olbermann is anchor of what is essentially the "Democratic Nightly News," the decision affirmed that he was being held to the same standards as other employees of MSNBC and its parent, NBC News, both of which answer to NBC Universal. Most journalistic outlets discourage or directly prohibit campaign contributions by employees. "

Olbermann is the antithesis of Bill O'Reilly on Fox.

"There are lots of expectations and assumptions about how birth order may shape our adult lives, and many of them go back ages. Centuries ago, the oldest son had huge incentives to stay on track and live up to family expectations - that's because, by tradition, he was set to inherit almost everything. "Historically the practice of primogeniture was very common in Europe," says Frank Sulloway, a visiting scholar at the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley. "So firstborns had every reason to preserve the status quo and be on good terms with their parents. Now you may think any "first born" effect would have completely disappeared in modern times. But not so, say experts who study birth order. Researchers first examined the status of firstborns among Washington power brokers in 1972."

"Will you have a better life if you graduate from an elite school? Students and their parents think the answer is yes, and competition for slots at top-ranked (and costly) schools seems higher than ever. Having a big name college on your resume can impress employers, friends and the opposite sex. The Times columnist Gail Collins says this national fixation makes little sense. "We can do a great service to the youth and parents of America by telling them to stop obsessing about choosing a college," she wrote recently in The Conversation blog. "Kids, you do not need to go to a school with a name that impresses your friends. Go to a school you can afford." If enough people took her advice, the spell might be broken. In the meantime, what should sensible and ambitious students keep in mind about where they go to school?"

"Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning. Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks - and less able to sustain attention. "Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing," said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: "The worry is we're raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently." But even as some parents and educators express unease about students' digital diets, they are intensifying efforts to use technology in the classroom, seeing it as a way to connect with students and give them essential skills. Across the country, schools are equipping themselves with computers, Internet access and mobile devices so they can teach on the students' technological territory. "

"It isn't often that a third of a movie audience sticks around to discuss its message, but that is the effect of "Race to Nowhere," a look at the downside of childhoods spent on résumé-building. " "How do you help your children balance when the whole education system is pushing, pushing, pushing, and you want your kids to be successful?" Alethea Lewis, a mother of two, asked a roomful of concerned parents who had just seen the film, a documentary, last week in Bronxville, N.Y., at a screening co-sponsored by the private Chapel School. With no advertising and little news media attention, "Race to Nowhere" has become a must-see movie in communities where the kindergarten-to-Harvard steeplechase is most competitive.

"It was once a staple of public school cafeterias that blended the indulgent and the nutritious, satisfying parents and children both. But chocolate milk is uncontroversial no more. Dozens of districts have demanded reformulations. Others have banned it outright. At the center of these battles are complex public health calculations: Is it better to remove sugary chocolate flavorings at the risk that many students will skip milk altogether, missing out on crucial calcium and Vitamin D? Or should schools instead make tweaks - less fat, different sweeteners, fewer calories - that might salvage the benefits while minimizing the downside?"

"These two ardorable boys bring a new meaning to the phrase "baby talk". A video of twin baby boys Sam and Ren having a hilarious conversation in their own language has become a web hit, after being posted online on Valentine's Day. "

"In 1990, Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota published a striking finding: About 70 percent of the variance in IQ found in their particular sample of identical twins was found to be associated with genetic variation. Furthermore, identical twins reared apart were eerily similar to identical twins reared together on various measures of personality, occupational and leisure-time interests, and social attitudes. Bouchard's study, along with many others, has painted a consistent picture: Genes matter. The studies say nothing about how they matter, or which genes matter, but they show quite convincingly that they indeed do matter. Genes vary within any group of people (even among the inhabitants of middle-class in Western society), and this variation contributes to variations in these people's behaviors. Let's be clear: Twin studies have received much criticism. Even though the proliferation of advanced statistical techniques (such as structural equation modeling) and the implementation of additional controls have allayed some of the concerns, they haven't allayed all of the them. Even so, the findings from twin studies should not be understated; it counters many a prevailing belief that we are born into this world as blank slates, completely at the mercy of the external environment. Because our psychological characteristics reflect the physical structures of our brains and because our genes contribute to those physical structures, there are unlikely to be any psychological characteristics that are completely unaffected by our DNA. "