undead astronauts

the national sleep foundation polled ppl of different racial groups and found that there were both similarities and differences. all groups reported getting less sleep than they wanted, and the vast majority of every group knew that lack of sleep led to health disorders. with that said, here’s the interesting stuff.

While watching TV was the activity most often performed every night or almost every night for all ethnic groups within one hour of going to bed, Asians were less likely than their counterparts to report doing so (52% vs. 75% Blacks, 72% Hispanics and 64% Whites).

Asians were much more likely to have been on the computer or Internet every night or almost every night than the other ethnic groups in the hour before bed (51% vs. 22% Whites, 20% Blacks and 20% Hispanics).

Meanwhile, Blacks were much more likely to have reported praying or doing another religious activity during this time every night or almost every night than their counterparts (71% vs. 45% Hispanics, 32% Whites and 18% Asians).

Hispanics tended to complete household chores every night or almost every night more often in the hour before bed time than their counterparts (41% vs. 33% Blacks, 25% Whites and 24% Asians).

Blacks (10%) and Hispanics (10%) were both more likely to report having sex every night or almost every night in the one hour before they went to bed than Whites (4%) and Asians (1%). [尸zed: oh come on...]

Asians were the least likely ethnic group to have consumed alcohol within one hour of bed time every night or almost every night (1% vs. 7% Whites, 4% Blacks and 4% Hispanics).

Whites are most likely to sleep with their pets — as well as more likely to sleep with their spouse or significant others. Sixteen percent of white respondents say they sleep with a pet, and 72% say they sleep with their partners. In comparison, only 4% of Asians, 4% of Hispanics, and 2% of black people let the pet on the bed. But the space isn’t always saved for a spouse or partner, apparently. Only 48% of blacks and Asians sleep with a ‘’significant other,” and 54% of Hispanics.

Recession-related stresses affected sleep to different degrees, with Hispanics and blacks more affected than whites or Asians.

Overall, Asians were the most likely ethnic group to say they get a good night’s sleep at least a few nights a week (84% vs. 72% Hispanics, 68% Whites and 66% Blacks), and Asians were also the least likely to have been asked about or discussed sleep with a HCP or doctor (31% vs. 56% Whites, 48% Hispanics and 45% Blacks).

i the skimmed about half the report which is huge. answering all the questions must’ve been a big snore.

a study has come out that asked college freshmen how many AP courses they took in high school. this is not a measure of iq. it is only a measure of how hard a student is willing to push himself in high school. obviously asians answered that they took more AP courses than other groups. this is in spite of the fact that more white and hispanic kids went to schools that offered AP courses. from previous studies u might then expect the following group order: asians, whites, hispanics, blacks. but in fact it doesn’t go that way.

hispanics actually take more AP courses than whites. looking further into the numbers, u see that a higher percentage of hispanics go to schools where AP classes are offered. but even so, the numbers show that hispanic kids are willing to work harder in the classroom.

unfortunately even though they take the class at higher rates, their rate of scoring 3’s or above is lower than whites. so while it may be that they work harder than whites, hispanics aren’t seeing all the fruits that might be expected from that hard work.

hat tip to 8asians for the story link.

an online dating site decided to go through their own dating data and see how race affected dating. and of course, anytime data such as this is posted, it’s gonna make some group (or all of them) look racist and/or pathetic.

the data held something that ran counter to my expectations: black women responded more to every race of message sender than any other female groups. that surprised me b/c i had always thought they wanted to date black men. that apparently isn’t true as the data shows something a little sadder…

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inflammatory title no? it’s not like i’m against desegregation in theory. like some magical panacea, if u desegregate, everyone will suddenly go colorblind and not see race but rather individuals. but when u read some of the current news, it doesn’t suggest that, by itself, desegregation leads to improved racial relations.

from newsweek:

Moody found that the more diverse the school, the more the kids self-segregate by race and ethnicity within the school, and thus the likelihood that any two kids of different races have a friendship goes down. (more…)

another steve sailor related post dealing w/ testing and ricci aftermath. he posts the percent of AP test takers who pass each test (earn 3, 4, or 5) by race in 2008. the reason he does this is b/c the equal employment opportunity commission (EEOC) that came up w/ the regulation that a test is racially “valid” only if the lowest scoring group passes at 80% of the rate of the highest scoring group. i considered posting the numbers, but u should just go to steve’s site for that.

the upshot is that none of the 38 AP tests conform to the 4/5 rule set by the EEOC. if attending college was considered a job, AP tests would be illegal. the tests where NAMs come closest to reaching 80% are french (74%), 3d studio art(73%), spanish lit (73%), and 2d studio art (72%).
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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…)

during a recent stroll downtown al47, archon and myself were talking about the need to revitalize downtown hsv. this has been a long standing issue w/ downtown b/c it has basically been (un)dead since as long as i can remember.

we noticed a new restaurant had popped up called, cotton row. but unfortunately, the jazz factory has moved to oregon. i can’t say i frequented the jazz factory much, but it’s one less reason to go downtown and there weren’t many reasons to go to begin w/.

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leave it to steve sailer to find and post this data. he takes the white scores as the baseline and finds where on that bell curve distribution other groups’ test avgs fall. it’s not pretty.

Mean Score as Percentile of White Distribution
Test 	 	Degree 	 	White 	Black 	Asian 	Tot Hisp Mex-Am
GMAT 	 	M.B.A. 	 	50% 	13% 	55% 	27% 	 24%
GRE-Verbal 	Ph.D./M.A. 	50% 	18% 	47% 	29% 	 28%
GRE-Quant 	 	 	50% 	14% 	66% 	29%  	 28%
LSAT 	 	J.D. 	 	50% 	12% 	47% 	19%  	 29%
MCAT-Verbal 	M.D. 	 	50% 	10% 	36% 	19% 	 21%
MCAT-Phys Sci 	 	 	50% 	14% 	61% 	24% 	 25%
MCAT-Biol Sci 	 	 	50% 	10% 	54% 	24% 	 25%
DAT 		D.D.S. 	 	50% 	16% 	60% 	27% 	 NA

what’s interesting to me is that the test takers are more self-selected than takers of the SAT or ACT. 60% of the US has at least completed some college, but only about 1/3 of the nation has actually completed an associate or bachelor’s degree to even be qualified to apply to grad school. i would have thought differences in group test scores would be lower just for having passed that initial hurdle.

that appears not to be the case for NAMs unfortunately, while the stereotype that asians do better in math and slightly worse in verbal is upheld. before investigating this stuff i would have assumed that lower verbal was due solely to being immigrants, but east asian nations have slightly lower verbal iq’s than european nations in general.

as anecdotal evidence (i.e. this is prolly meaningless), my SAT verbal was higher than my math, but that changed on my GRE. in high school, my parents had me memorizing SAT words for years b/c they knew the PSAT verbal scores were doubled and that those scores mattered for national mertit awards. but for my GRE, i took practice tests a week or two in advance and that was it.

my experience may attest to the difficulty in raising scores and keeping them at a higher level than they would normally be… or who knows, maybe my GRE score was just a fluke.

there’s a forbes story making the rounds that coronates indian americans as the new model minority. this isn’t exactly news to ppl who follow this kinda stuff, but its interesting to see the mainstream media picking up on this.

East Asians continue to excel in the U.S, but among minority groups, Indians are clearly the latest and greatest “model.” In 2007, the median income of households headed by an Indian American was approximately $83,000, compared with $61,000 for East Asians and $55,000 for whites.

About 69% of Indian Americans age 25 and over have four-year college degrees, which dwarfs the rates of 51% and 30% achieved by East Asians and whites, respectively. Indian Americans are also less likely to be poor or in prison, compared with whites.

the author also mentions high indian IQ as a possible contributing factor.

Indian Americans place at about 112 on a bell-shaped IQ distribution, with white Americans at 100. 112 is the 79th percentile of the white distribution. For more context, consider that Ashkenazi Jews are a famously intelligent ethnic group, and their mean IQ is somewhere around 110.

Given the small sample size, the rough IQ measure and the lack of corroborating data sets, this finding of lofty Indian-American intelligence must be taken cautiously. Nevertheless, it is entirely consistent with their observed achievement.

so the next question might be whether indian immigrants are typical of indians from the subcontinent. there have been some studies on indian IQ which show something like 80-85, but none of them are definitive b/c the caste system has created a bunch of endogamous groups, and on top of that there are regional ethnicities that prefer endogamy. it’s a statistician’s nightmare and it’s possible that indian IQ variance is very high.

but it’s instructive to look at another group of immigrants to at least see how self-selection might influence representation. africans have generally averaged lower IQ scores than other groups. whether this is due to environmental factors like nutrition or to genes is up for debate. but african immigrants to the US have higher educational attainment than any other regional group including asians  (note: indian americans as an asian subgroup probably still has a higher attainment) according to the 2000 census. their median income was also comparable to that of asian immigrants.

in fact, african immigrants or their kids may compose up to 2/3 of black students at ivy league institutions like harvard. obama is only the most obvious example. he graduated harvard law magna cum-laude, and that is not something harvard gives away as an affirmative action nicety. his dad was a harvard grad, and one of his brothers is a physics phd. these immigrants however only compose 0.2% of the US population, so most of the time they aren’t especially visible. one of the few that i’ve actually met was in my graduate applied mathematics course and he was sharp as a tack.

oddly, the dataset which produced this result for indian immigrants contains info for african immigrants and shows it to be 89. there’s a significant disconnect here and i’m not sure how to explain it.

UPDATE: hmm. well, i’ve been reading some and one theory on why educational attainment of african immigrants don’t match their iq is that the content in the education is not up to standards in the west. apparently US universities won’t accept credit transfers from many african institutions. e.g. south african credits were always taken until sometime after aparteid when the classes became easier. i don’t know how true this explanation is, so caveat lector.

steve sailer points to a washington post report from yesterday that finds that immigrants and children of immigrants are less likely to marry out of their ethnic background than before. this was done from the 2000 census, so trends may have changed again since then.

The number of native- and foreign-born people marrying outside their race fell from 27 to 20 percent for Hispanics and 42 to 33 percent for Asians from 1990 to 2000, according to Ohio State University sociologist Zhenchao Qian, who co-authored a study on the subject. The downward trend continued through last year, Qian said.

“The immigrant population fundamentally changes the pool of potential partners for Asians and Hispanics. It expands the number and reinforces the culture, which means the second generation . . . is more likely to marry people of their own ethnicity,” said Daniel T. Lichter, a sociologist at Cornell University.

the original report is in some sociology mag, so i don’t know if there’s a disparity between native born vs forgein born. i also don’t really know how they dealt w/ mixed race ppl getting married. for example, did they count a hapa getting married to a monoracial asian as “in-group” marriage?

but really, almost as interesting as the article itself is why this article was published now instead of 2 years ago b/c that was when the study was released, and there is no newer data cited. if u consider the metapolitics, it’s possible this article was only published b/c we now have a biracial pres. whereas before, this topic was uninteresting to most wapo readers, now that obama is governing in dc, ppl all of a sudden want to know the current state of interracial marriages. black/white marriages didn’t show any meaningful change, so they stumbed onto the asian/hispanic finding.

i’d like to do a lexisnexis search to confirm this suspicion, but unless u’re a university student or something, u need a subscription.

PS – something else i’m not sure the data takes into account is separating south asians from east asians. i’ve seen conflicting opinions where some say exogamy for south asians is low and other say it’s high (35-40%). i don’t really have a feel for which way it might trend from personal observations, b/c they’ve been all over the map.

it’s funny how sometimes seemingly contradictory information comes out almost simultaneously. in this case the issue is whether asians are taking over or leaving.

a few days ago, slashdot pointed to a story about how many skilled immigrants (primarily east and south asians) are heading home and potentially producing a brain drain.

Despite the fact that they constitute only 12% of the U.S. population, immigrants have started 52% of Silicon Valley’s technology companies and contributed to more than 25% of our global patents. They make up 24% of the U.S. science and engineering workforce holding bachelor’s degrees and 47% of science and engineering workers who have PhDs. Immigrants have co-founded firms such as Google (GOOG), Intel (INTC), eBay (EBAY), and Yahoo! (YHOO).

these aren’t old fogies going back to retire in asia. these are young professionals with full careers ahead that are leaving.

The average age was 30 for Indian returnees, and 33 for Chinese. They were highly educated, with degrees in management, technology, or science. Fifty-one percent of the Chinese held master’s degrees and 41% had PhDs. Sixty-six percent of the Indians held a master’s and 12.1% had PhDs. They were at very top of the educational distribution for these highly educated immigrant groups—precisely the kind of people who make the greatest contribution to the U.S. economy and to business and job growth.

this doesn’t bode well for a desperately needed economic recovery. the problem gets worse b/c of visa issues that many of them face. on the other hand, slanteye points to new census info saying aa’s are the fastest growing ethnic group in america.

as of 2007, there were 15.2 million Asians in the United States. Percentage growth of the Asian population between 2006 and 2007, the highest of any race group during that time period. Asian Americans were also the most educated, according to the report. Among Asians over 25 years old, 50 percent have a Bachelor’s degree, compared with only 28 percent of the total U.S. population. About 20 percent of Asian Americans hold Master’s degrees, which is twice of the national average. Among all Asian Ameicans, Indians have the highest education and income level. Nearly 70 percent of Indians in the United States have Bachelor’s degrees and the average annual income of Indian families is $83,820.

which is leading to hilarious counterreactions like this:

I grew up in this area my whole life and you asian fucks come here and use your fucking opium money to buy our land, build a million fucking wedding shops and refuse to put signs up in ENGLISH! FUCK YOU! … If you DON’T LIKE US THEN MOVE BACK TO YOUR FUCKING HOMELAND!

which is kinda ironic since that’s exactly what they’re doing. obviously the census data isn’t taking into account events of the past year, but this phenomenon isn’t necessarily limited to immigrants and isn’t necessarily a short term economic thing. amongst many of my asian american friends, there’s a feeling that moving to asia and becoming an expat is a valid, and maybe even preferred, move for career and/or personal reasons.

the upshot may be that asians do both. many skilled asians could end up leaving and prolonging the economic downturn. and the ones that stay? well they may end up “taking over” as it were. haha.

interestingly, tom friedman suggested one path to dramatically shortening the downturn would be to ask asian immigrants to help out.

“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate — no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.”

that’s laughably stereotypical, but it’s also change i could believe in.

so a just published study looked pretty deeply into the demographics of everquest ii, and it comes up with some numbers which surprised me. parts of it are so surprising that i’m tempted to say that these numbers shouldn’t be generalized to other games or even other mmos. there are some definite stereotype busters here.

so some of the surprising results include the avg age (31). this isn’t as surprising to me as some of the other results, as i would have guessed somewhere in the mid to late 20s. but it’s definitely a far cry from teenage or even college age players that most ppl perceive as the biggest demographic.

the # of hrs played also mostly goes up by age. that’s another surprise. i would’ve thought that college age ppl had the most time to play games. that’s most certainly not the case.

gender also held surprises. 80% of players are men. okay, that wasn’t surprising. but of the 20% of women who do play, they play more than men. 29hrs to 25hrs. wtf… rly? that means the avg female gamer is harder-core than the avg male gamer. i would’ve bet money that this wasn’t the case and i would’ve lost. i’ve played w/ female gamers in various games and now that i think about it, i realize they ran more clans/guilds (or at least were in leadership positions) and played pvp more than i previously gave them credit for. this winter i pvped w/ one girl who said she had to play w/ one hand b/c she was carrying her baby in the other arm. that struck me as very hardcore at the time, but i had rationalized it as a fluke. but perhaps it is much more common than i realized.

for race, the surprising thing was that asians underrepresented their numbers in the general population (2.7% of players vs 3.6% of pop). that result completely contradicts my life’s gaming experience. but i don’t want to overinterpret this result before seeing the demographics of other games. i would be surprised if this holds up generally. but if other games mirror this result, it’s possible my entire perception of gaming has been skewed as a result of playing competively. asians have won a number of gaming tournaments historically including fps, rts, fighting, and mmo genres. they number 7 of 17 of the hall of famers in the wcg. the guild i played competitively w/ in gw were almost all chinese, and i regularly meet ppl who recognize my characters’ in-game names are chinese profanity.

the mean household income for players was $84.7k vs $58.5k for the general population. they also typically have higher educational achievement, are less likely to be christian or even religiously inclined, and are healthier than the general population. this might break stereotypes elsewhere, but i wasn’t too surprised by results here. most of the ppl i played w/ have been sharp and these results correlate w/ iq.

i hope future studies like these are conducted in all major gaming genres so we can see if there are differences between genres of games. my instinct is to say yes there must be differences b/c different genres of movies surely have different viewers, but maybe the data would surprise me again.

edit:

PS – i thought this was good insight.

cali universities have had a no racial preference admission policy for years. that apparently isn’t the case anymore. in a nominal bid to increase black and hispanic admission, they’re changing the rules. they’re dropping the rule that states applicants must take 2 SAT subject tests. but here’s what’s really gonna happen:

Remarkably, though, the university’s own projections indicate that the plan will do almost nothing to expand black enrollment and will be of very modest benefit to Hispanics. Even more remarkably, the prime beneficiaries of the changes will be non-Hispanic whites, whose share of total enrollments is predicted to rise by 20–30 percent. And the big losers will be Asian Americans, whose numbers will be reduced by 10–20 percent. The net effect will thus be to make the University of California substantially “whiter” than it has been.

nice. gotta love those whiter ppl. they get to pat themselves on the back for being progressive on minority rights, and they get to stick it to those pesky asians who just don’t understand that they’re supposed to be nice and give up their spots to unqualified whites, oops i mean blacks and hispanics, who won’t graduate b/c they can’t understand the material.

EDIT: commenter AL47 posits that test taking ability may not properly gauge what makes a good college student. that’s certainly possible. but according to this (credit to half sigma for the link), the UC system already knows what better predicts college performance b/c of a study they themselves conducted back in 2001.

so w/ ABDC in it’s 3rd season, i thought i’d do a bit of research on one of the prime factors that interest me about the show besides the dancing. there’s consistently so many asians! but how many are there really?

i went to the abdc site and counted the racial makeup of all the groups. for some i had to resort to looking up surname origins, and even then, there were a few that were completely indecipherable to me that i left out. dancers like taeko from fyshnchicks, i also left out b/c i knew they weren’t monoracial. i kept track of the total however. so lets take a look at the numbers:

so for a pop culture heavy channel like mtv, on a show demonstrating the most competitive dance crews in the US, asians have made up over 1/4 of the total contestants. blacks make up the largest group (not surprisingly), and hispanics make up the smallest group.

i then looked at the representation ratio by dividing the contestant % by their respective racial pop w/i the US as stated by wiki. and wow, what a result. asians are representing at almost 6X their number in the general population. blacks are overrepresented at almost 2.5X their population. hispanics are closest to 1, and whites are very underrepresented.

by now, i’d guess a lot of ppl know how at least part of this situation is explained. while hiphop was started by blacks and hispanics in nyc ghettos during the 70s, since that time the cultural movement has spread worldwide. asians, and in particular filipinos, have become a major force in hiphop dance styles (various moderns, battle of the year winners, hiphop international winners) as well as other aspects of hiphop such as djing (qbert) and to a small extent in rapping (jin, far east movement) and fashion (bathing apes).

i don’t have data on this, but in my experience, asian american involvement in the clubbing scene appears disproportional to their population size w/ many clubs around the nation’s urban areas geared towards serving a primarily asian clientele. they may have also pushed certain dance styles such as liquid, freehand glowsticking (a form of contact juggling), and glowstringing in directions they wouldn’t have gone otherwise.

anyways. as pertains to abdc, california and texas asians make up a significant number of the really competitive dance groups. much of this is due to hiphop having strong cultural roots w/ filipinos, but other asian groups are certainly present. e.g., kaba modern was started by filipinos but the group of dancers that made it to the show had no filipinos. these dance groups routinely hold intercollegiate dance competitions such as vibe, fusion, and body rock, amongst others. 4 such groups (kaba, millenia, jabba and soreal) made it to abdc.

some may see this as stereotype breaking, but maybe it’s not so astereotypical after all. studies show that ppl w/ rhythm have higher intelligence, and of course asians are commonly stereotyped as being good academically and shit.

interestingly, there’s another study that says dancing may indicate reproductive fitness. in a jamaican group, members of the opposite sex rated symmetrical ppl’s dancing as more attractive than asymmetrical ppl.

now note that i’m not saying this proves anything racially beyond the issue that dancing prolly shouldn’t be considered stereotype breaking for asians. it should be considered par for the course.