Undead Astronauts

1. should u attend an ivy? a post at gnxp shows a graph of mean earnings at age 28 vs US News rankings. this more than ever reinforces my opinion that colleges need to drop their unofficial asian quotas. i knew results from law school earnings resembled this graph, but didn’t know that it applied to the general college population so starkly.

2. some of you may have heard the recent news that atheists/agnostics tend to know more about religion than the ppl that actually believe. here’s the quiz they gave. of course this news should come as no surprise b/c religion correlates negatively w/ iq.

3. “it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation.” – stephen hawking in a particularly “there is no spoon” zen moment. he says there may never be a theory of everything. further reason to think today’s theoretical physicists are full of it.

1. youths of different races abuse gateway drugs at different levels. while overall asian drug use is very low compared to other races, some speculate that adderall abuse is not-uncommon. i’ve thought about using modafinil to concentrate before. parental influence is given as the biggest contributor to low use in asians, and next was popularity. if you’re asian, drugs are, like, way uncool yo. hispanics are the heaviest abusers, then blacks, then whites.

2. robots programmed to lie. researchers programmed a robot to lie. it had to decide if it was in conflict with another entity, and if it was, to lie by producing a false trail to their final hiding spot. making the false trail is no big deal as any robot could be programmed to do that. but i wonder about giving a robot the capacity to decide whether or not to lie. i mean seriously, have the researchers not seen terminator? robot+ability to lie and conceal itself = not good things

3. newsweek has it’s list of top college rankings out. AU and UA both place inside the top 10 on one of their lists! ah but of course, it would be the list of best schools for jocks. i mean obviously. beyond that, they have a lost of questionable tops lists. best schools for jocks/gays? best small/big schools? rural/suburban/urban? do people actually consider that when choosing a school? i guess i didn’t put much thought into it when i was choosing.

4. action gamers make decisions more quickly with comparable accuracy than non-action gamers. and tests indicated this is a trainable brain function.

diversity in college punishes asians. we all know this, as there have been articles and books published about the subject. a new study of top tier schools show by just how much.

To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550. Here the Espenshade/Radford results are consistent with other studies, including those of William Bowen and Derek Bok in their book The Shape of the River, though they go beyond this influential study in showing both the substantial Hispanic admissions advantage and the huge admissions penalty suffered by Asian applicants. Although all highly competitive colleges and universities will deny that they have racial quotas — either minimum quotas or ceiling quotas — the huge boosts they give to the lower-achieving black and Hispanic applicants, and the admissions penalties they extract from their higher-achieving Asian applicants, clearly suggest otherwise.

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checkout where your college stands:

http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges