Undead Astronauts

For any given open competitive academic slot, a non-Asian minority is less likely than an Asian to win that spot on average. In NYC, where Asians only comprise 14% of students, they are 70% of the population of Stuyvesant  So the non-Asian minorities have now sued to get rid of the single test entrance exam. Their complaint is that they don’t get to take the expensive prep classes that Asians (of all economic backgrounds) take. But here’s the kicker:

The city began offering a free test-prep program several years ago for black and Hispanic students, but after a legal challenge, other ethnic groups were granted the same access to the course. Today, 43 percent of the students in the program are Asian.

So… who cares and who doesn’t care about whether they get in? Seems pretty clear to me. If you can’t compete with Asians on an exam, don’t attempt to study. Just cry racism. Maybe you’ll get the test dumbed down enough that 42% of non-Asian minorities get a 97 and you can pick students randomly. There’s a new firefighter lawsuit by the way. Not content to make the academic half of the test meaningless, women are suing for the physical part. Women are screened out from the physical exam at higher rates than men. Apparently they don’t do as well as men on “arm and leg lifts, arm endurance tests, hose dragging and stair climbing.” Absolutely shocking, I know!

“It’s a test that doesn’t really test for the abilities you need to become a firefighter, and screens out women needlessly and unjustifiably,” said attorney Marni Willenson, who represents some of the women in the Godfrey suit and is lead attorney on Vasich.

Uh huh.

Take this test and see what your color identification skills are. I got a 3, but I might have done better without all the afternoon glare on my screen. A perfect score is 0.

It’s important to use headphones on this one.

(Source: Peer Rev Neurons)

LOL. Apparently, science is all pink, lipgloss and sunglasses. Who knew?

(Source: CV)

Think you’ve seen this before? Try it again.

Charles Murray (of The Bell Curve fame) has a new book out called Coming Apart. In it, he makes an argument that class lines in recent decades have solidified such that the upper class and working class don’t understand each other’s lives anymore.

He has a quiz which he says will give the responder an idea of his own ignorance of working class life and also an idea of how widespread that ignorance reaches within his circle of friends. Here is the 25 question quiz. Some of the questions seem really fuzzy to me as my idea of a close friend is probably different from other people’s idea of a close friend, and some of them seem like regional questions. But in general, a quiz taker will probably understand the thrust of his questions.

Living in the south and considering the places I’ve been and things I’ve done for work , I would have thought my score would be rather higher. I scored a 25 which would put me as slightly more isolated than the typical first-generation upper-middle-class person with middle-class parents. But as this test and book was probably more geared toward describing whites, I think some of the bubble effect is related to my racial/ethnic background. Regardless of the reasons, it’s true that I haven’t often encountered individuals from other stations in life. Until recently, I didn’t hang out with anyone without at least a college degree, much less be able to call one of them a close friend. That has changed within the past several years, but only in a technical sense as the friend I’m thinking of was prevented from attending college for documentation reasons and not because she was unwilling or unable to finish the coursework.

How thick is your bubble and how well do you think you understand the lives of working class people?

1. The B-W achievement gap rears it’s head in Huntsville school system. It’s actually worse here than elsewhere in the state. Not only is the gap larger, it goes in the wrong direction where blacks are scoring worse than the state avg rather than whites scoring much higher. (data here)
2. Link between dance and madness. Interestingly, it mentions how dancers have put themselves into a trance-like state since time immemorial and how serotonin based drug usage correlates with that aspect of dance.
3. Ah, the wonders of technology… brings new meaning to the word jigglypuff. (source)

1. Opera, both Beijing and classical European, is booming in China due in part to the “build it and they will come” mantra. I find the last paragraph particularly interesting: “They are all looking to China for the survival— the only hope for growth — for all classical music, frankly,” said Shirley Young, chairwoman of the US-China Cultural Institute. “The future of classical music is here.” It’s a little ironic that so few Westerners appreciate their own high culture anymore that it has to find a new home in the East to survive.
2. Razib summarizes a study on time preference across nations. It’s interesting to note that testing a four year-old with the marshmallow test can predict where the kid’s average SAT score will be with a 210 point difference between those who could wait and those who couldn’t. The difference is equivalent to the difference between rich and poor kids and greater than the difference between kids w/ grad school parents and those whose parents didn’t finish high school. There’s a cool graph which I’ve copy/pasted here. The college kids were asked if they’d prefer $3.4k now or $3.8k in a month. I don’t think the graph takes into account per capita income or social trust, but interesting nonetheless.