Undead Astronauts

Skybird X has previously said that asian discrimination in education (universities and even high schools!) is less important today than it was in the past b/c many asians simply gave the finger to big business after college and founded their own companies. the data somewhat vindicates this view. cb insights is a business intel company that has just released a survey on venture capital companies. included in the questions posed to these companies was what was the racial makeup of the teams getting funded. the results are as follows

race | population % in US | recipient of capital

white | 77% | 87%

black | 11% | 1%

asian | 4% | 12%

additionally, the survey found that teams comprising completely of asians were the ones that received the largest amount of capital. the reason given for such low black representation is that were hardly ever black entrepreneurs who pitched ideas to begin with. 92% were male, harvard grads edged out stanford grads in number, and surprisingly, mba’s outnumbered master of science degrees.

UPDATE 7.15.10: more info on the cast here.

the ktown reality show cast has been revealed, and it’s 8 ppl w/ and even mix of guys and girls.  i must say the cast does appear to be following ktown conventions in style, except for the white haired jasmine. here are their names: Young Lee, Jennifer Field, Joe Cha, Scarlet Chan, Violet Kim, Peter Le, Steve Kim, and Jasmine Chang.

the contestants looked full blood asian to me except the obvious jennifer field. i looked her up and she’s a half korean beauty queen. well, i suppose that figures… she’s gorgeous. scarlet chan is also some sort of entertainment industry wannabe from the appearance of her twitter. i can’t tell what violet does, but it couldn’t be very time-consuming considering how much she blogs. jasmine, whose hair sets her apart, is of course a hairdresser. peter le is… something i wish had not come up. go to peterfever.com if u really want to know. i don’t even want to know what the other guys do after looking peter up. the show’s official twitter is here.

there are more pics here of their activities during the pilot episode. this reminded me of the ktown cowboys episodes i didn’t post. i’ve put them up after the jump.
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so the setup appears to be on a comic book superhero story track. either through heredity or strange accident, there arises a number of super powered dancers. a secret society of sorts called LXD is gathering these dancers for training when their powers appear, a lot like x-men. and just like in the x-men, there’s a dangerous opposing faction akin to magneto’s brotherhood of mutants.

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poreotix takes abdc season 5! i didn’t follow abdc especially closely this season except for poreotix and hype 5-0′s performances and both went far. hype 5-0, the all asian hawaiian crew, got 2nd runner up. blueprint cru, whose leader is asian, got runner up. and of course, poreotix took it all home.

so out of 5 seasons, 4 of the winning crews (jabbawockeez, super cr3w, quest crew, poreotix) were majority or completely asian. season 4 winners, we are heroes, had 2/5 asians w/ asian leader. all considered, that’s insane. asians fucking own street dance.

of the runner ups in the past, we have soreal (all asian), beat freaks (asian leader), and blueprint.

of the 2nd runner ups, we have kaba modern (all asian), fanny pak (1), and hype 5-0.

here is one of poreotix’s better performances.

a study of SNPs has determined that the entire asian population came from a single migration from south asia.

Results showed that individuals coming from the same region, or speaking the same language had great genetic similarities, and Asia was populated through a single migration from the south.

“It seems likely from our data that they entered South East Asia first – making these populations older [and therefore more diverse],” a leading member of the consortium Edison Liu said.

that ppl from the same region or speaking the same language should tend to share great genetic similarities should surprise no one. this next part was interesting to me tho.

“So although the Chinese population is very large, it has less variation than the smaller number of individuals living in South East Asia, because the Chinese expansion occurred very recently, following the development of rice agriculture – within only the last 10,000 years.”

i’m not sure if i would have expected that. china has an array of different dialects and ethnicities, and i would have thought that would contribute to diversity. apparently, it doesn’t. at least not much genetically.

finally, one of the researchers says the findings were a “reassuring social message,” which “robbed racism of much biological support.” that’s a nice sentiment, but is it really that assuring? they’ve found that within a rather short amount of time (geologically), 10,000 years, a number of groups had diverged significantly enough that scientists could easily guess their region of origin or their spoken language. yes, we all came from one population, but now apparently we’re demonstrably different genetically. hmm. i’m not feeling especially reaassured.

UPDATE: here’s a graph from that study i saw on gnxp.

2009 SAT scores have been tabulated and the wsj summarized the results (hat tip to halfsigma).

Average scores for the class of 2009 in critical reading dropped to 501 from 502, in writing to 493 from 494 and held steady in math, at 515. The combined scores are the lowest this decade and reflect stalled performance over the past three years. The reading scores are the worst since 1994.

Many observers Tuesday viewed the flat results of recent years as discouraging in light of a more than 25-year effort to improve U.S. education. “This is a nearly unrelenting tale of woe and disappointment,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “If there’s any good news here, I can’t find it.”

au contraire mr. finn, but there is good news…

Asian-American students showed the most dramatic gains. In math they scored an average of 587 — 72 points better than the general population. Since 2008, their average math score has climbed six points. (more…)

the nytimes has a story on how interracial roommates decrease prejudicial views except when one roommate is asian. it cites a UCLA study that attempted to verify or disprove contact theory. contact theory is the idea that social contact between different racial groups can, in itself, serve to lessen prejudicial views. the researchers studied the # of roommates from different groups, group affect (how positively/negatively a person viewed ppl from other groups), intergroup unease & competence (ease and competance person felt in dealing w/ ppl from other groups), the symbolic racism, social dominance orientation,  anti-misegenation attitudes, friendship homogeniety, and interracial dating present in 1st year students. it then kept track of those students’ roommates for 4-5 years in college and restested them at the end to see how their attitudes tracked. (more…)