Half Sigma

In Turkey, the generals are the good guys

When the military ousts a democratically elected government, is that good or bad?

Americans instinctively say that's bad, but in Turkey it's a good thing. In Turkey, the military keeps the country secular and ensures the rights of people who don't want to live under a fanatic Taliban-like regime.

Memo From Istanbul -- In Turkey, Fear About Religious Lifestyle

Healthcare and economics in Maine

The state of Maine created a universal health care plan that anyone can sign up for, even if they have a pre-existing condition.

Given that the health plan isn't cheap, the smart way to use it is to only sign up for it if you need it. As I wrote above, the plan covers pre-existing conditions, so unlike with normal private plans, you can sign up even if you have some really expensive medical condition.

The people of Maine turned out to be smarter than the politicians gave them credit for. People with expensive medical conditions signed up for the plan and healthy people didn't.

For this reason, opt-in health plans just don't work very well. The only way to do it properly is to raise everyone's taxes and then give it to everyone.

Smart people have less sex

There is an excellent post by Jason Malloy at Gene Expression about sex and intelligence.

My theory, as I wrote in previous posts, is that more intelligent people have lower sex drives and are less attractive to the opposite sex.

Jason Malloy writes that a "revealing finding from the Counterpoint survey was that while 95% of US men and 70% of women masturbate, this number is only 68% of men and 20% of women at MIT!" Strong evidence of lower sex drive among smart people.

Who attends sports events?

In the 1993 General Social Survery, respondents were asked if the attended a sporting event during the last year:

ATTSPRTS 473. Next I'd like to ask about some leisure or recreational activities that people do during their free time. As I read each activity, can you tell me if it is something you have done in the past twelve months? Let's begin with attending an amateur or professional sports event. Did you do that within the past twelve months?

When you compare this with respondents' degree, we see that the more education one has, the more likely one is to have attended a sports event during the last 12 months:

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		ATTSPRTS
		1 YES	2 NO	ROW TOTAL
DEGREE	0: LT HIGH SCHOOL	27.2 74	72.8 198	100.0 272
	1: HIGH SCHOOL	54.8 425	45.2 351	100.0 776
	2: JUNIOR COLLEGE	64.2 61	35.8 34	100.0 95
	3: BACHELOR	69.8 157	30.2 68	100.0 225
	4: GRADUATE	78.8 82	21.2 22	100.0 104
	COL TOTAL	54.3 799	45.7 673	100.0 1,472

It's expensive attending sporting events, so people without college degrees are less likely to be able to afford it. It has also seemed to me that attending sporting events is a popular activity with the upper middle class.

But a very interesting thing happens when you compare this with the respondent's Wordsum score (the ten word vocabulary test which I use as a proxy for IQ):

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		ATTSPRTS
		1 YES	2 NO	ROW TOTAL
WORDSUM	0	.0 0	100.0 3	100.0 3
	1	16.7 2	83.3 10	100.0 12
	2	21.2 7	78.8 26	100.0 33
	3	43.4 23	56.6 30	100.0 53
	4	47.1 49	52.9 55	100.0 104
	5	45.9 61	54.1 72	100.0 133
	6	62.4 136	37.6 82	100.0 218
	7	68.7 103	31.3 47	100.0 150
	8	63.2 67	36.8 39	100.0 106
	9	60.0 51	40.0 34	100.0 85
	10	54.3 25	45.7 21	100.0 46
	COL TOTAL	55.6 524	44.4 419	100.0 943
Means		6.43	5.68	6.10
Std Devs		1.83	2.26	2.07
Unweighted N		524	419	943

It turns out that attendance at sporting events peaks at Wordsum 7 and then falls as the respondent becomes smarter. This is not what one would have expected based on the fact that people with graduate degrees are most likely to have attended a sports event.

My theory is that, as people become smarter than Wordsum 7, watching sports becomes less interesting.

The correlation between IQ and net worth

Several people wrote to me yesterday about an article that claimed that IQ had no correlation with wealth. This didn't make sense to me.

Luckily, Michael Vassar pointed me to an article which more properly explained this research.

On the surface, people with higher intelligence scores also had greater wealth. The median net worth for people with an IQ of 120 was almost $128,000 compared with $58,000 for those with an IQ of 100.

But when Zagorsky controlled for other factors – such as divorce, years spent in school, type of work and inheritance – he found no link between IQ and net worth. In fact, people with a slightly above-average IQ of 105, had an average net worth higher than those who were just a bit smarter, with a score of 110.

This makes sense, and is consistent with my own findings that, after education is accounted for, above average intelligence doesn't result in higher income. (And when I looked at only people with bachelor's degrees, higher IQ predicted lower income.) IQ predicts educational attainment, and educational attainment is what predicts income. And of course, without higher income, it's unlikely that one will wind up with a greater net worth.

Some people might have expected that people with higher IQ but the same income would be better at saving their money, but I wouldn't have expected that. Living a white collar lifestyle requires more expenses than a blue collar lifestyle, and the expenses begin with the student loans that the white collar person accrues in order to attend college.

Rudy Giuliani had low SAT score

According to Steve Sailer, Rudy Giuliani only scored 1073 on the SAT. George W. Bush is widely considered to be a dumb president, yet he scored 1206 on the SAT, quite a bit better than Rudy. (Let me remind readers that the scoring system was more difficult pre-1995 by approximately 70 points.)

Rudy, however, had the good sense to attend NYU, the second best law school in New York City at the time. This demonstrates that good academic credentials are more important for getting into a good career track than high intelligence.

The legal profession places a high premium on being smart. This has forced Rudy, over the years, to act like he's smart. George W. Bush, on the other hand, seems to go out of the way to act like he's dumb.

Dean of admissions at MIT lied about her credentials

Well here's some irony in the news:

Marilee Jones, a prominent crusader against the pressure on students to build their resumes for elite colleges, resigned Thursday as dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after acknowledging she had misrepresented her own academic credentials.

So Ms. Jones had to lie about her credentials in order to obtain a career track that enabled her to get a bully pulpit to tell other people not to worry about getting the best credentials.

And then there's also the hypocrisy that she's responsible for rejecting people who lie on their applications.

Many women prefer to stay home with their young children

An op-ed piece in today's NY Times by Linda Hirshman complains that there's a big problem that not enough women with children are working.

Here are the important statistics:

Sixty percent of married mothers of preschool children are now in the work force, four percentage points fewer than in 1997. The rate for married mothers of infants fell by about six percentage points, to 53.5 percent. The bureau further reports that the declines “have occurred across all educational levels and, for most groups, by about the same magnitude.”

And the following statistical fact is important enough to be quoted separately:

New mothers with husbands in the top 20 percent of earnings work least, the report notes.

Well there's no mystery here. A lot of women like being with their young children more than they like going to work. And women with wealthier husbands don't need the money as much, so they can afford to do what makes them happier.

The author of the article recommends changing the tax code to encourage women to work more. I think this is ridiculous. Why do we need a tax break for women whose husbands are in the top 20% of income? Normally the liberals complain about conservatives endorsing tax cuts for the rich. Now the shoe is on the other foot.

Smart and dumb music

In 1993, the General Social Survey had questions about musical tastes. A person's score on the Wordsum vocabulary test has a strong correlation with the type of music he likes. For example, below is the chart for classical music (sample limited to white respondents born in this country):

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		CLASSICL
		1 Like	2 Mixed Feelings	3 Dislike	ROW TOTAL
WORDSUM	0	100.0 1	.0 0	.0 0	100.0 1
	1	25.0 2	50.0 4	25.0 2	100.0 8
	2	27.8 5	16.7 3	55.6 10	100.0 18
	3	20.6 7	17.6 6	61.8 21	100.0 34
	4	30.1 22	17.8 13	52.1 38	100.0 73
	5	33.7 35	31.7 33	34.6 36	100.0 104
	6	48.7 91	23.5 44	27.8 52	100.0 187
	7	48.2 67	33.1 46	18.7 26	100.0 139
	8	59.8 58	24.7 24	15.5 15	100.0 97
	9	70.0 56	21.2 17	8.8 7	100.0 80
	10	75.0 33	20.5 9	4.5 2	100.0 44
	COL TOTAL	48.0 377	25.4 199	26.6 209	100.0 785

Not all of the musical genres show such a strong correlation, but here is how the various genres fall:

Smart Music

Big Band/Swing
Blues or Rhythm and Blues
Classical music-symphony and chamber
Folk (folk musicians are very smart)
Jazz (but shows some Wordsum 10 falloff similar to Broadway musicals)
Latin/Mariachi/Salsa
New age/space music
Opera
Reggae

Dumb Music

Country
Gospel (an especially strong correlation)
Heavy Metal
Mood/easy listening
Rap music

Unclear patterns

Bluegrass
Oldies rock

And now let me write about two unusual cases. The first is "contemporary pop/rock":

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		CONROCK
		1 Like	2 Mixed Feelings	3 Dislike	ROW TOTAL
WORDSUM	0	100.0 1	.0 0	.0 0	100.0 1
	1	50.0 3	.0 0	50.0 3	100.0 6
	2	30.0 6	15.0 3	55.0 11	100.0 20
	3	47.4 18	13.2 5	39.5 15	100.0 38
	4	57.1 44	18.2 14	24.7 19	100.0 77
	5	52.7 58	20.9 23	26.4 29	100.0 110
	6	67.9 127	15.5 29	16.6 31	100.0 187
	7	60.1 83	13.0 18	26.8 37	100.0 138
	8	54.5 54	30.3 30	15.2 15	100.0 99
	9	47.4 37	23.1 18	29.5 23	100.0 78
	10	40.9 18	27.3 12	31.8 14	100.0 44
	COL TOTAL	56.3 449	19.0 152	24.7 197	100.0 798

Because pop/rock is the one type of music aimed at the average American, it's not surprising that it is most loved by people with the modal wordsum score of 6. In both the upward and downward direction, there is a pretty signficant dropoff in the percent of people who like it.

And finally, let's look at "Broadway musicals/show tunes":

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		MUSICALS
		1 Like	2 Mixed Feelings	3 Dislike	ROW TOTAL
WORDSUM	0	100.0 1	.0 0	.0 0	100.0 1
	1	16.7 1	50.0 3	33.3 2	100.0 6
	2	21.1 4	36.8 7	42.1 8	100.0 19
	3	27.8 10	22.2 8	50.0 18	100.0 36
	4	40.0 30	20.0 15	40.0 30	100.0 75
	5	48.6 51	24.8 26	26.7 28	100.0 105
	6	50.0 93	26.9 50	23.1 43	100.0 186
	7	54.4 74	25.7 35	19.9 27	100.0 136
	8	63.5 61	24.0 23	12.5 12	100.0 96
	9	71.2 57	20.0 16	8.8 7	100.0 80
	10	53.5 23	34.9 15	11.6 5	100.0 43
	COL TOTAL	51.7 405	25.3 198	23.0 180	100.0 783

Show tunes are most liked by respondents with a Wordsum score of 9, and then there is a steep dropoff for respondents with a Wordsum of 10. One could just chalk this up to measurement error caused by the small sample size, but I think the dropoff is too large to be the result of chance. I think that the smartest people really don't like this music because it's just too cheery and meaningless. Smart people prefer vocal music that's more melancholy, like folk music, which shows a pretty big rise in appreciation between 9 and 10 (but not as big an increase as Reggae).

Respondents with Wordsum 9 favor show tunes over folk by 71.2% to 53.2%. But respondents with Wordsum 10 favor folk over show tunes by 65.9% to 53.5%.

And let's talk about Reggae. Only 28.6% of respondents with Wordsum 9 like it, but 53.8% of respondents with Wordsum 10 like it. What's that about? I think the respondents are thinking of classic Bob Marley reggae (which I like). Someone once gave me a CD with some modern Reggae music, and it sucked.

A clueless professor of journalism

There's an article in today's NY Times entitled You Are What You Grow. The author, Mike Pollan, a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkely, demonstrates that he's completely economically illiterate.

Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

Comparing costs of food based on calories is a completely ridiculous comparison. Carrots are pretty cheap when looked at on a weight basis. It's not the carrots' fault that they only have 200 calories per pound. One should be comparing a pound of potato chips to a pound of carrots, and then the carrots wind up costing less money.

The cost of soda needs to be compared to the cost of seltzer or just plain water. You would expect the soda to cost more because as cheap as corn syrup may be, it's still an additional ingredient along with the other ingredients in the soda. Water is a free resource. Yet the soda costs more money than just plain water or plain carbonated water.

Orange juice obviously costs more than soda because it has to be refrigerated, which significantly increases the price. And I'm sure oranges cost more to grow than corn, even without federal subsidies to corn farmers.

The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

This guy is completely wrong. The primary reason why food marketed to poor people costs less is because poor people are more price sensitive. Upper class foods cost more because upper class people are less price sensitive. The higher up the market you go, the more money has to be spent on marketing in order to create the perception of being a premium product.

Maybe this explains why the media is so clueless. Because the professors who teach the journalists are clueless.

More gun ownership statistics

People asked about gun ownership by city vs. country. The samples sets are limited to white people born in the U.S.

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		OWNGUN
		1 YES	2 NO	3 REFUSED	ROW TOTAL
XNORCSIZ	1: CITY GT 250000	29.4 667	70.1 1,591	.5 11	100.0 2,269
	2: CITY,50-250000	39.2 824	60.1 1,262	.7 15	100.0 2,101
	3: SUBURB, LRG CITY	37.3 1,347	62.0 2,242	.7 26	100.0 3,615
	4: SUBURB, MED CITY	42.7 940	56.7 1,248	.6 14	100.0 2,202
	5: UNINC,LRG CITY	52.4 497	46.7 443	.9 9	100.0 949
	6: UNINC,MED CITY	55.9 706	43.3 546	.8 10	100.0 1,262
	7: CITY,10-49999	52.7 710	46.4 624	.9 12	100.0 1,346
	8: TOWN GT 2500	55.1 609	44.5 492	.5 5	100.0 1,106
	9: SMALLER AREAS	63.8 849	35.0 465	1.2 16	100.0 1,330
	10: OPEN COUNTRY	72.4 1,113	27.2 419	.4 6	100.0 1,538
	COL TOTAL	46.6 8,262	52.7 9,332	.7 124	100.0 17,718

As we see, there a very strong bias in favor of gun owners living in the country, even stronger than the IQ bias discussed in the previous post. One of the reasons for the IQ correlation is because smart white people live in the city while dumb white people live in the country:

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		XNORCSIZ
		1 1-3	2 4-10	ROW TOTAL
WORDSUM	0	47.5 29	52.5 32	100.0 61
	1	34.0 51	66.0 99	100.0 150
	2	37.2 119	62.8 201	100.0 320
	3	34.9 227	65.1 424	100.0 651
	4	36.6 450	63.4 779	100.0 1,229
	5	39.6 821	60.4 1,253	100.0 2,074
	6	42.9 1,285	57.1 1,712	100.0 2,997
	7	47.5 1,074	52.5 1,187	100.0 2,261
	8	50.4 772	49.6 761	100.0 1,533
	9	56.0 677	44.0 533	100.0 1,210
	10	62.8 558	37.2 331	100.0 889
	COL TOTAL	45.3 6,063	54.7 7,312	100.0 13,375
Means		6.59	6.01	6.27
Std Devs		2.07	2.00	2.05
Unweighted N		6,063	7,312	13,375

However, within every single XNORCSIZ code, gun owners have a lower average Wordsum score than non-gun owners. So there is still an IQ effect independent of the XNORCSIZ effect.

Dumb white people own guns

Today I examine how people respond to the gun ownership question on the General Social Survey.

OWNGUN 237. Do you happen to have in your home (IF HOUSE: or garage) any guns or revolvers?

First of all, we learn that gun owners tend to be white:

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -N of cases		RACECOMB
		1 White	2 Black	3 Other	ROW TOTAL
OWNGUN	1: YES	45.6 10,704	27.7 1,118	21.1 212	42.2 12,034
	2: NO	53.6 12,580	71.7 2,893	78.7 793	57.1 16,266
	3: REFUSED	.7 173	.6 25	.2 2	.7 200
	COL TOTAL	100.0 23,456	100.0 4,036	100.0 1,008	100.0 28,500

Then I compared Wordsum scores (a 10 word vocabulary test which is a good proxy for IQ) to gun ownership for white respondents only (and also only for respondents born in the United States):

Statistics for RACECOMB = 1(White)
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		OWNGUN
		1 YES	2 NO	3 REFUSED	ROW TOTAL
WORDSUM	0	44.1 15	55.9 19	.0 0	100.0 34
	1	39.0 32	61.0 50	.0 0	100.0 82
	2	45.9 85	53.5 99	.5 1	100.0 185
	3	55.2 223	44.1 178	.7 3	100.0 404
	4	51.8 394	46.9 357	1.3 10	100.0 761
	5	51.1 642	48.3 607	.6 7	100.0 1,256
	6	48.6 866	50.6 903	.8 14	100.0 1,783
	7	45.8 619	53.5 723	.7 10	100.0 1,352
	8	43.1 409	56.6 537	.2 2	100.0 948
	9	36.9 272	62.8 463	.3 2	100.0 737
	10	34.2 178	64.9 338	1.0 5	100.0 521
	COL TOTAL	46.3 3,735	53.0 4,274	.7 54	100.0 8,063

Although the average white American in this sample set has a Wordsum score of 6.29, respondents with the very low Wordsum score of 3 were the most likely to have a gun in their home. As Wordsum score increases, the likelihood of gun ownership decreases.

A similar pattern is observed for black respondents, but mixing the two races together results in a less informative chart because of the fact that blacks tend to have lower Wordsum scores than whites.

Wordsum score is also a good proxy for class, so we learn that gun hobbies (like collecting them or going hunting with them) are low class.

Why does gun ownership decrease when wordsum score decreases below 3? Probably because (1) these people are more likely to be too poor to afford a gun; and (2) these people may not even be smart enough to learn how to operate and maintain a gun.

Finally, I thought it's pretty interesting to compare gun ownership to religion:

Statistics for RACECOMB = 1(White)
Cells contain: -Column percent -N of cases		RELIG
		1 Protestant	2 Catholic	3 Jewish	4 None	ROW TOTAL
OWNGUN	1: YES	53.4 7,627	35.5 2,269	13.1 75	37.9 838	46.1 10,809
	2: NO	45.8 6,547	63.8 4,080	86.6 497	61.5 1,357	53.2 12,482
	3: REFUSED	.8 115	.7 42	.3 2	.6 13	.7 172
	COL TOTAL	100.0 14,289	100.0 6,390	100.0 575	100.0 2,208	100.0 23,463

Jewish people are extremely unlikely to own a gun.

Geek news: Dell brings back XP

I recently wrote about how, since the release of Vista, there were no Windows XP based computers sold in retail stores and I had to buy an older model online to get a laptop with XP.

Apparently I'm not the only person who has been looking for an XP computer. Dell has announced that it's bringing back XP to its home systems.

I hope someone at Microsoft is getting the message.

More about weird students at universities

Cho facts (mostly from LA Times article):

(1) Committed to mental hospital.
(2) More than one female student filed formal complaint that Cho was stalking them.
(3) Dorm residents complained to administration that he was writing weird stuff on the dorm walls.
(4) Professors complained to administration about his strange behavior and he had to be removed from one professor's class.

All the university has to say to its defense is "that mental health anti-discrimination laws" prevented it from doing anything about the problem.

As I said more briefly in a previous post, universities should expel students who are too weird. Even when they don't kill anyone, they still scare other students and faculty, and they aren't benefitting from their university education because they will be too weird to get a job worthy of a college educated person after they graduate.

Virginia Tech seems to be in the majority as far as what is done about weird students. Here's an opinion piece in the NY Times about a weird student at Oakland University. Professors complained about his weird behavior and his arsenal of guns, but the university did nothing.

Coddling of weird people does not help prepare them for the real world. An employer won't allow a weird person to stay on the job (except for crappy low wage jobs with high turnover--another reason to avoid being part of the bottom third of society), universities should act in the same manner. If laws truly prevent universities from doing someting about the problem, then the laws need to be changed.

Cho was picked on in school

From the Associated Press:

Long before he boiled over, Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui was picked on, pushed around and laughed at over his shyness and the strange way he talked when he was a schoolboy in the Washington suburbs, former classmates say.

Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., with Cho in 2003, recalled that the South Korean immigrant almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation.

Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho's turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded "like he had something in his mouth," Davids said.

"As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, `Go back to China,'" Davids said.

I'm not at all surprised to read this. I'm sure it was his experiences in primary and secondary school which led him to become so detached from humanity.

So if we're looking to point blame somewhere, I blame the Virginia public school system for ignoring the problems of kids like Cho. As long as a kid doesn't cause any trouble to anyone else, and performs above grade level on standardized tests, the system figures that there is no problem and no need to waste any extra resources.

You would think that, after Columbine, society would have woken up to the problems faced by outcast kids like Cho, but I guess that another massacre was needed. I'm pretty sure that this was one of the points of Cho's ramblings. He specifically referred Eric and Dylan (the Columbine perpetrators) as "martyrs."

Should Cho have been expelled?

After reading this article, I think that colleges should expel students who are really weird.

I agree with Bill Maher

I agree 100% with this Bill Maher opinion piece.

Gonzales v. Carhart

The Supreme Court has upheld a Congressional statute prohibiting intact dilation and extraction medical procedures.

This seems, to me, consistent with the general principle that Congress can regulate the practice of medicine.

I think it's a dumb statute, because the prohibition is for political reasons, and based on the dubious proposition that the standard dilation and extraction procedure is morally superior to the intact dilation and extraction procedure, but the Court is once again correct in applying the general principle that laws aren't unconstitional merely because they are stupid.

I'm surprised that the liberals aren't all behind this decision, because normally they approve of Congress' authority to regulate stuff.

Does ugliness cause mass murdering?

At my post about the Asian gun collector from Virginia Tech, "turkey" commented that he "seems shockingly handsome to be a weirdo."

Well here's the photo of Cho Seung-Hui identified as the real killer:

[Photo removed until I can verify that I had the correct photo.]

The real killer turns out to be an ugly nerdy looking guy. The "turkey" was right!

The blogosphere and the airwaves are full of worthless theories about how this massacre was caused by too many guns, not enough guns, video games, etc., but the real story is how society ostracizes ugly young men to such an extent that they no longer feel any emotional attachment to other human beings.

People want to blame something for this tragedy. Well every person who has ever mistreated someone because of their physical appearance needs to take some blame. Of course, people would rather point fingers than look in the mirror, so no one is going to own up to their own wrongdoing.

Not enough women majoring in computer science?

The New York Times seems to think so.

Despite the article telling me over and over again that this is such a big problem, I confess that I fail to see why this is any bigger of a problem than not enough men being interested in becoming school teachers or nurses. (Aren't there also shortages of school teachers and nurses?)

Women received about 38 percent of the computer science bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States in 1985, the peak year, but in 2003, the figure was only about 28 percent, according to the National Science Foundation.

I am quite surprised that theare are so many women receiving computer science degrees, because in the trenches of corporate IT departments, I'd say that less than 10% of the computer programmers are women.

Since then, many in the field say, the situation has worsened. They say computing is the only realm of science or technology in which women are consistently giving ground. They also worry that the number of women is dropping in graduate programs and in industry.

Yes, the article says over and over again how bad the situation is, but why?

Well, the article mentions something about "economic competitiveness." But none of the countries we are competing against have any women programmers either. I've dealt with loads of Asian and Indian programmers, and the male/female ratio for those foreign computer programmers seem to be the same as for American-born programmers.

As far as I can tell, women just don't have what it takes to be computer programmers. What does it take? Mathematical aptitude (which is quite distinct from actual high level math knowledge, but basic aptitude seems to be the same) combined with a love of computers. None of the female computer programmers I've dealt with love computers the way many of the hardcore geeky male computer programmers do.

“People think there are no jobs, but that is not true,” said Jan Cuny, a computer scientist at the University of Oregon ...

There are lots of jobs for fast food workes too, but it's not something that people aspire to. Given that the average computer programmer is as likely to be an immigrant as the average fast food worker (at least that's how it seems to me), I would say that computer programming falls under the category of jobs that "Americans don't want to do."

The big problems, these and other experts say, are prevailing images of what computer science is and who can do it.

“The nerd factor is huge,” Dr. Cuny said. According to a 2005 report by the National Center for Women and Information Technology, an academic-industry collaborative formed to address the issue, when high school girls think of computer scientists they think of geeks, pocket protectors, isolated cubicles and a lifetime of staring into a screen writing computer code.

My personal experience is that the the depection of computer programming presented in the above quote is pretty correct. Minus the pocket protectors, no one wears those anymore. (I think they harken back to the days when engineers had to to their own drafting using pencil and paper.)

However, I'm all in favor of a movement to enhance the image of computer programming, not so much to attract women, but to make it a desired occupation for Americans rather than a haven for foreigners.

The popular media needs to depict computer programmers in a positive manner. They need to be good looking white men who get with the hot babes. Whenever the media depicts a computer programmer, it's always a nerdy guy, often Asian or Indian.

How about a family sitcom where the father is a computer programmer, but a cool computer programmer and not a nerdy one?

Gunman's blog (rumor apparently false)

Is this the gunman's blog? [Update: it's not, it's just the blog of an innocent Asian gun collector.] His name, allegedly, is Wayne Chiang.

Was the Virginia Tech gunman Muslim?

Speculation that the "Asian" gunman was a Pakistani Muslim.

On the other hand, here's a report that it was an East Asian who went on a rampage because his girlfriend dumped him.

IRS auditing more middle class returns

The NY Times reports that the IRS is auditing more middle class returns.

I say that this is a good thing because too many people cheat (not the article says that only 70% of income is reported), and cheating punishes the honest people which is the opposite of how a good social order should be. Honesty should be rewarded, not punished.

And of course no one is listening to me, but Congress should make the following simple changes to eliminate the temptation to cheat in the first place:

1. Eliminate the deduction for charitable contributions, the biggest source of cheating by the middle class.

2. Eliminate the deduction for medical expenses, another source of cheating, and a lot of taxpayers don't understand the rules, so claim stuff they are not supposed to (like medical insurance which is already pre-tax), and without an audit these things go right past the IRS.

3. Make brokerage firms report both the amount paid for a security as well as the amount it was sold for. This is the biggest source of cheating by the upper middle class.

Moms with cameras

Today the NY Times documents a trend I never knew about before.

As digital single-lens-reflex cameras have become more affordable, more people — overwhelmingly women, according to the Professional Photographers of America — are starting photography businesses. They often begin as part-time ventures, sometimes on top of full-time employment elsewhere.

Until now, I thought that that big, heavy, high end cameras were something men bought. This doesn't mean that women don't like photos. Just the opposite, if you check out online photo sharing sites such as Webshots, the vast majority of people sharing photographs are female (a large share of whom are too young to be referred to as "women"). But women tend to go for small and technologically non-threatening cameras.

But it seems that the atypical woman buys a big SLR digital camera, learns how to take quality photos of her own children, and then using her network of moms starts selling her services to other moms at a lower price (sometimes much lower) than that offered by traditional professional photographers.

The NY Times isn't clear on this, but I get the impression that the majority of these moms with a camera (MWACs) are upper middle class stay-at-home moms looking for a hobby. This seems like a win-win situation for all the moms. They get better quality photos of their babies, and the mom with a camera gets to keep busy while her husband is off working.

I don't have much sympathy for the professional photographers who are losing business. It serves them right for thinking that they can make money doing something that is commonly done for free as a hobby.

Hypocrite governor of NJ

The governor of New Jersey was riding in the front seat without a seatbelt, despite the fact that this violates the law in New Jersey.

Another hypocrite politician who thinks the laws he creates and enforces don't apply to him.

Maureen Dowd was right

Men are no longer necessary.

Imus' mistake: he apologized

Don Imus has apologized profusely for his "nappy-headed hos" remark. His apologies, at best, seem like a real waste. MSNBC canned the television broadcast of his radio show, CBS suspended him for two weeks, and I strongly suspect he's going to be fired from radio as well. Thus he could have just said "f*** you, I can say whatever I want on my radio show," and the results would have been no worse for him.

But it goes beyond that. Although apologizing may seem like the Christian thing to do when you've accidentally offended someone, we live in a society where Christian virtues aren't rewarded.

By apologizing, Don Imus demonstrated weakness to the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons, and thus an opportunity to push even harder to further humiliate him and boost their own visibility. By apologizing, the message he sent to the white executives at CBS, MSNBC, and the companies of the advertisers pulling their ads, is that he had something to apologize for.

In order for an apology to someone you offended to have the response of "I accept your apology and forgive you," the aggrieved party has to have been genuinely offended. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and even the black girls on the Rutgers basketball team, were likely not offended. After all, blacks pay money to listen to their favorite rappers use the exact same words in their music. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were not genuinely offended, they are just trying to work up the crowd because they enjoy humiliating a rich white guy and enjoy being in the public spotlight.

UPDATE

As I predicted above, Imus has now been fired from CBS.

White people are stupid

Radio DJ Don Imus is apologizing over and over gain for stringing together the words "hoe" and "nappy-headed." Not two words that I would have thought of using, but that's because I don't listen to rap music.

Female law student strips naked and gets spanked

The front page story from todays NY Daily News (one can see the cover here) is about a female law student from Brooklyn Law School who appeared on Playboy TV. She "happily strips naked, gets spanked and holds gavels up to her bare breasts."

Who says the NY Times has all the news that's fit to print? This important story is a Daily News exclusive.

Someone left the following important comment on the article:

Dear NY Daily News, Your paper needs to be informed about the prospects of a tier 2 law student. We're far from "Top Law Students." We're more like indentured servants who will work miserable $50,000/year jobs to pay off massive student loan debt. Sure someone from a good school, like Fordham, NYU or Columbia, has a bright future. They will make $200,000 at one of hundreds of Vault firms. But not us. At tier 2 schools like Brooklyn, all but the top 10% take sweatshop jobs at ID firms. If you don't believe me look at this website http://nycinsurancelaw.googlepages.com/salarychart . Make sure you click on the links to see what it's like to work at one of these firms. If she wants to cope with this misery by posing naked in a video then that?s her prerogative. Leave her alone and use your efforts to fight the life crushing fraud that is a tier2/3/4 law school.
Loyola 2L

Cognitive dissonance and online dating

I found the following quote from a John Tierney blog post especially interesting:

Fewer than 1 percent [of online daters] rated themselves as having “less than average looks.”

Obviously, if what people said about themselves matched reality, 49% of online daters would have "less than average looks." (Maybe even more than 49%, because people with better than average looks are less likely to need an online dating service.)

I think that part of the above phenomenon has to do with puffing (because this is an ad and not an honest self-assessment), but part surely has to do with the fact that ugly people often don't realize they are ugly.