Word: icelandic
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Today, in Iceland and Sweden, girls consistently outperform boys in math and physics (see box). In Sweden the gap is widest in the remote regions in the north. That may be because women want to move to the big cities farther south, where they would need to compete in high-tech economies, while men are focused on local hunting, fishing and forestry opportunities, says Niels Egelund, a professor of educational psychology at the Danish University of Education. The phenomenon even has a name, the Jokkmokk effect, a reference to an isolated town in Swedish Lapland...
This fishing village of 1,480 people is a bleak and lonely place, even in a country suspended at the top of the world. Set on the southwestern edge of Iceland, the volcanic landscape is whipped by the North Atlantic winds, which hush everything around them. A sculpture at the entrance to the village depicts a naked man facing a wall of seawater twice his height. There is no movie theater, and many residents never venture to the capital, a 50-min. drive away...
...Sandgerdi might be the perfect place to raise girls who have mathematical talent. Government researchers two years ago tested almost every 15-year-old in Iceland for it and found that boys trailed far behind girls. That fact was unique among the 41 countries that participated in the standardized test for that age group designed by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. But while Iceland's girls were alone in the world in their significant lead in math, their national advantage of 15 points was small compared with the one they had over boys in fishing villages like Sandgerdi...
...F.K.O.” sounds suspiciously like an overplayed insurance commercial, and mostly instrumental exercises “The Hook” and “Eyewash,” while pleasant enough, sound like mediocre Múm outtakes that were accidently sent to Oakland instead of Iceland...
Gail Marshall, whose grown son had turned their house into "boy central," enjoyed having two "daughters" last year, from Iceland and France: the three women loved cooking, trading intimacies and getting done up at the salon together. Another year, Richard Marshall, a singer in his church choir, finally found a musical soul mate in a German "daughter." He taught her the tune for Itsy Bitsy Spider, which they sang in the car, making up their own lyrics...