Teaching Company course on IQ

A commenter recommends as a good intro to the subject of I.Q. the Teaching Company's course "Intelligence and the Human Brain" (which has, intelligently enough, subsequently been given the more Jonah Lehreresque title "The Intelligent Brain").

The lecturer:

Dr. Richard J. Haier is Professor Emeritus in the School of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine, where he has been teaching and conducting research since 1984. He earned his B.A. in Psychology from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and his Ph.D. in Psychology from Johns Hopkins University. Before his appointment at Irvine he was on the faculty of Brown University’s Alpert Medical School. 

Professor Haier’s main research interest is the structural and functional neuroanatomy of higher cognitive processes, especially intelligence. In 1988, he and his colleagues conducted the first modern functional brain imaging study of intelligence with positron emission tomography (PET) and proposed a hypothesis linking good performance on an intelligence test to efficient brain function. Professor Haier’s more recent research with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has identified specific brain areas where gray and white matter features correlate to the g factor of intelligence and other intelligence factors. In 2012, he received the Distinguished Contributor Award from the International Society for Intelligence Research. 

In addition to his many professional publications, Professor Haier’s research has been featured on NOVA scienceNOW, NPR, CNN, and CBS Sunday Morning, and in numerous newspaper and magazine articles.

My crazy conspiracy theory

I have this crazy conspiracy theory. Yeah, I know conspiracies never happen. Still, call me nuts, but I suspect that there is this massive conspiracy that goes all the way to the top. Leaders of both political parties are conspiring together to write secret long term nation-changing legislation. To pass it they are conspiring with the President, the press, big business, the Catholic Church, radical leftists, the financial industry, an Antipodal media baron, big landowners, lobbyists, foreign interests, Facebook, and the world's richest man to cheat the average American out of his patrimony.

Okay, forget I ever said that.

GOP frontrunner for 2060 Presidential nomination named

From the NYT:

Mr. Bush, 66, who has remained largely removed from the spotlight in the four years since leaving the White House, returned to television screens on Monday in a series of hospital snapshots with his new granddaughter, Mila, who was born to Jenna and Henry Hager in New York on Saturday night. 

Boston marathon: Who did it?

Open for comments.

Mother Jones: What America needs to get high test scores is the blond teaching the blond

Kevin Drum writes in Mother Jones a bit of boilerplate Conventional Wisdom, subversively self-parodied, however, by the caption for the photo intended to demonstrate what effective early childhood education would look like.

Day Care, the Final Frontier 

—By Kevin Drum| Mon Apr. 15, 2013 12:13 PM PDT

In 2011, Jon Cohn wrote a story called "The Two Year Window," about new research demonstrating the importance of the first two years of a child's life. Roughly speaking, most child care that's average or better is probably OK. But down in the bottom third, conditions are often bad enough to cause permanent cognitive damage, sometimes at a biological level. One third is a lot of kids. 

Appropriately, two years later Cohn is back with a follow-up, "The Hell of American Day Care." Children who get proper attention and interaction, he says, "tend to develop the skills they need to thrive as adults—like learning how to calm down after a setback or how to focus on a problem long enough to solve it":

The caption in Mother Jones reads, "Unfortunately, this is the exception in America, not the rule." Evidently, the blonde teaching the blonde is the exception, unfortunately, not the rule.

By the way, all this talk about how there's a "two year window" right after birth to equalize IQs, which makes "Day Care, the Final Frontier," is so 2005. By 2015, I predict, the new conventional wisdom will become that the Final Frontier is Prenatal Care, providing a window exactly eight months and twenty-nine days long.

Kaus on Rubio's BS

The downside of Mickey Kaus as a blogger at the Daily Caller is that he doesn't Feed the Beast anywhere near as often as other bloggers, and unlike more successful bloggers, posts only on a fairly small number of subjects where he knows what he's talking about.

The upside of Mickey as a blogger is, well, stuff like this:

Marco Rubio was defensive and jargon-addled on ABCs This Week. He was slick and effective on NBC and  CNN and somewhere in between on FOX,  But he was selling BS on all four networks. Here are three examples: 

1. Rubio repeatedly said it would be “cheaper, faster and easier” for illegal immigrants to go back home, wait 10 years, and apply for a green card (under current law) than to go through the longer “alternative” green card path created by his amnesty bill. That’s absurd. If Rubio’s bill passes, how many illegal immigrants are going to go home and wait 10 years versus accepting the bill’s more-or-less immediate legalization and then waiting to get their green cards?  The answer is a number approaching zero. Why? Because under Rubio’s bill they will get to do the waiting while living and working legally in the United States. That’s certainly easier than “self-deporting” for ten years under current law. 

2. Similarly, Rubio argues that his bill won’t privilege illegals over those waiting in line abroad to get green cards, because it will take longer for illegals to get the green cards through his amnesty. But, again, the illegals–having been more or less instantly legalized–will get to do their waiting while having already achieved what the people waiting in line abroad can only dream of achieving: a legal life in the United States. Illegals FTW!

3. A controversy erupted late last week over the pro-amnesty “Gang of 8″s ambition to achieve a 90% apprehension rate of illegal border-crossers. Rubio’s camp–including his chief of staff, Cesar Conda–claimed this was a “trigger” that, if not met, would block the newly legalized illegals from proceeding down the road to green cards and citizenship. Democrats claimed it was just a goal that, if not met, wouldn’t block anyone. On Fox, Rubio basically admits the Democrats are right. 

WALLACE: You say it’s a trigger, the number, 90 percent apprehension rate has to be certified by the Department of Homeland Security before the 11 million illegals, a decade from now, can begin to apply for green cards. 

But the Democrats on your “Gang of 8″, including Dick Durbin, who will be on in the next segment, saying, no, it’s not a trigger. It’s just a goal that they have to be working towards. 

Now, is it a trigger that has to be met or is it a goal? 

RUBIO: Yes. Let me tell you why it’s a trigger because, basically, homeland security will have five years to meet that goal. If after five years, Homeland Security has not met that number, it will trigger the Border Commission who will then take over this issue for them. So, they’ll have five years to get it done. They have to create these two plans — a fence plan, there has to be a fence component to this, and a border security plan. 

And if at the five-year mark, they have not achieved that 90 percent or 100 percent, then they lose the issue to the Border Commission who has money set aside so they can finish the job and they can get to that number. 

In other words, all that’s triggered is a commission, not any holdup in the march to green cards (which means there will be little incentive to actually achieve the 90% goal). 

Bonus BS: Rubio press aide Alex Conant tweets that 

Without temporary worker program to fill US demand for low-skill labor, people will find way to come illegally despite new fence 

Really? Hasn’t Rubio been busy telling us that his plan would secure the border? Now his flack tells us people “will find a way to come illegally” despite it? Doesn’t this mean that those who can’t get into the guest worker program (maybe because it’s full, or because they don’t qualify) will be able to “find a way” in as well–so the elaborately negotiated limits on the number of guestworkers will be routinely violated and, in practice, meaningless? Doesn’t it also mean that those who are drawn by the prospect of the next amnesty (because, you know, ”we can’t deport them all!” and “Latino voters”) will “find a way” in too? 

How secure is this new Rubio border going to be? Seems like it’s secure when he wants it to be and insecure when he doesn’t. Maybe we should find out before we turn on the amnesty magnet! Just a thought.

"Congressional Influence as a Determinant of Subprime Lending "

Via Marginal Revolution, a study on New Century Financial Corporation, an Orange County subprime lender, whose collapse in early 2007 was the the first crack in the dam.

Congressional Influence as a Determinant of Subprime Lending 

Stuart A. Gabriel, Matthew E. Kahn, Ryan K. Vaughn 

NBER Working Paper No. 18965 

Issued in April 2013 

We apply unique loan level data from New Century Financial Corporation, a major subprime lender, to assess whether attributes of Congressional Representatives were associated with access to and pricing of subprime mortgage credit. Research findings indicate higher likelihoods of subprime loan origination and lower mortgage pricing among borrowers represented by the Republican and Democratic leadership of Congress. Black borrowers also benefitted from significantly larger loan amounts in those same districts. Also, borrowers received mortgage interest rate discounts in districts where New Century donated to the Congressional Representative. Findings provide new insights into the political geography of the subprime crisis and suggest gains to trade between New Century Financial Corporation and targeted Congressional Representatives in the extension, pricing and sizing of subprime mortgage credit.

Marco Rubio: "Two ... Thousand Dollars!"

Rubio Offers Full-Throated Support for Immigration Bill 

By ASHLEY PARKER and BRIAN KNOWLTON 

Senator Marco Rubio offered an extraordinary endorsement of legislation to overhaul the nation’s badly strained immigration system on Sunday when, after holding back for weeks, he appeared on no fewer than seven television talk shows to explain and defend a plan that he said would be “a net positive for the country, now and in the future.” 

As Mr. Rubio, a Florida Republican who is a member of a bipartisan group of eight senators preparing to unveil their immigration legislation on Tuesday, pressed his case again and again on the airwaves, new details of the bill emerged. Prominent among them was a proposed fee of roughly $2,000 that illegal immigrants would have to pay before they could earn legal status. 

As part of that plan, which was still being completed on Sunday, these immigrants would have to pay $500 when they apply for a temporary work permit, and would have the next 10 years to pay the remaining $1,500 or so, a person familiar with the negotiations said. ...

A Senate aide described the $2,000 figure as “significant but not impossible, punitive but not unreasonable.” Democrats and immigration advocates had originally pushed for a lower amount. 

... In each appearance he spoke with a sense of urgency, arguing that the plan did not constitute amnesty for illegal immigrants. ...

Even Karl Rove, the former political adviser to President George W. Bush who is known as a hard-nosed partisan strategist, welcomed the cooperation on immigration.

Even Karl Rove!

L.A. Times: "Immigration bill would spark surge of legal arrivals"

From the L.A. Times:

Immigration bill would spark surge of legal arrivals 

The immigration debate often focuses on people in the U.S. illegally, but a reform bill's biggest initial effect could be a sharp rise in legal immigration.

By Brian Bennett and Lisa Mascaro, Washington Bureau  

April 13, 2013, 8:13 p.m. 

WASHINGTON — While much of the debate over immigration has focused on the fate of the estimated 11 million people in the U.S. without legal authorization, one of the biggest immediate impacts of the reform bill being prepared in the Senate would be a sudden, large surge in legal migration. 

The U.S. admits about 1 million legal immigrants per year, more than any other country. That number could jump by more than 50% over the next decade under the terms of the immigration reform bill that a bipartisan group of senators expects to unveil as early as Tuesday. The impact would be felt nationwide, but areas that already have large immigrant communities would probably see much of the increase. 

The immigration package includes at least four major provisions that would increase the number of legal immigrants, according to people familiar with it. Some of the parts could generate as much controversy as the provisions dealing with those who enter the country illegally or overstay their visas, according to those with long experience of the politics of immigration. 

Supporters say that higher levels of legal immigration would meet the U.S. need for certain kinds of workers. Increased legal migration also would reduce most of the incentive for illegal border crossings, backers of the plan say, and would allow border agents to focus on smugglers and people with violent criminal records. 

Opponents such as Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who has long opposed measures to increase immigration levels, say new workers would depress wages and crowd out Americans looking for work during a time of persistently high unemployment. 

"The masters of the universe in glass towers and suites, they may not be impacted by this, but millions of struggling American families will," Sessions said in an interview Friday. "We do need to be sure we aren't exacerbating unemployment and wage erosion in America."

Good first sentence, Jeff. Work on the second one.

The surge would come in several ways: The bill aims to eliminate the current backlog of roughly 4 million people waiting to be reunited with family members in the U.S. The 11 million now in the country without legal authorization would be eligible for citizenship only after that backlog was resolved. Reunification efforts would require boosting the number of visas issued each year.

You know, if they really want to reunite, they can always go home.

To keep the additional inflow under control, the bill would stop allowing adult siblings of immigrants to qualify, but children and parents would continue to be eligible. 

In addition to family unification, which allows people into the country permanently, the bill also aims to increase temporary visas for both high-wage and low-wage workers. The number of visas for high-tech workers could nearly double to more than 120,000 per year.

Because Mark Zuckerberg isn't rich enough.

At the other end of the wage scale, a new visa system would allow businesses to bring in workers for jobs including janitors, housekeepers and meatpackers.

Because nothing says well-paid like janitor, housekeeper, or meatpacker. Because nothing says high test scores like the children of janitors, housekeepers, and meatpackers.

The numbers would start small, but as the unemployment rate declined, it could reach 200,000 a year by the end of the decade. And growers could bring a total of about 330,000 new farmworkers into the country during the decade. At least some of those low-wage temporary workers eventually would be allowed to seek permanent residency.

The bill's authors expect that legal immigration eventually would decline again, but only 10 years after the bill passed, once the backlog of residency applications shrank.

Just keep repeating to yourself: "But it's good for The Economy. Who am I to stand in the way of The Economy? The Economy doesn't exist for me, I exist for The Economy."

How is the hot new field of "Data Science" different from dull old marketing research?

From the NYT:

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW calls data science “the sexiest job in the 21st century,” and by most accounts this hot new field promises to revolutionize industries from business to government, health care to academia. 

The field has been spawned by the enormous amounts of data that modern technologies create — be it the online behavior of Facebook users, tissue samples of cancer patients, purchasing habits of grocery shoppers or crime statistics of cities. Data scientists are the magicians of the Big Data era. They crunch the data, use mathematical models to analyze it and create narratives or visualizations to explain it, then suggest how to use the information to make decisions. 

In the last few years, dozens of programs under a variety of names have sprung up in response to the excitement about Big Data, not to mention the six-figure salaries for some recent graduates.

I started in the marketing research field in 1982, working on the "purchasing habits of grocery shoppers" using the new flood of data from checkout scanners. By 1987, we had all purchases from about a tenth of the supermarkets in the country. My wife worked on "tissue samples of cancer patients" in 1987. 

I wouldn't discourage people from getting interested in these kind of fields, but “the sexiest job in the 21st century?"

People make a lot of money by (roughly in order) owning things, selling things, and motivating and managing (and firing) people. Analyzing stuff is fine work to get paid to do if you have an analytical personality, but, in the long run, don't expect to get paid like the sales guys. 

The culture of golf

Golf is one of the few spectator sports that has an honor system, which makes it increasingly out of date. In contrast, baseball always had a culture in which getting away with cheating was admired. There were occasional players famous for their sense of fair play -- if the lone umpire during the dead ball era had his vision blocked, he would sometimes ask Ivy League gentleman Christie Mathewson to call the play for him -- but that was famously exceptional. Baseball is a team game, where loyalty to teammates is considered more important one's conscience. Golf, however, is different.

The honor system in golf is not for showing off Presbyterian rectitude for its own sake, but to facilitate gambling, which has always been a huge part of the game. Golfers wander all over a quarter square mile or more of landscape, providing endless opportunities for cheating. The chief enforcement mechanism in a culture of betting is a concern for one's reputation as a sportsman. The statements made by other golfers about Tiger Woods this week have been in the ancient tradition of gentlemen policing their game, which is why it has struck many observers as atavistic.

Here is one of the less famous incidents of golfers calling penalties on themselves, but I saw it live on TV and it was still pretty amazing: Arnold Palmer calling an extra stroke on himself on the 69th hole of the 1984 U.S. Senior Open while in second place:

Miller Barber, who won 11 PGA Tour events before enjoying tremendous success on the Senior Tour, had begun the final round one shot behind the iconic Palmer, but Barber had gone ahead with a series of 10 straight pars and as they stood on the 15th green, Barber was now ahead by two shots.  

Palmer had air-mailed a 7-iron over the green at the par-3, chipped to 10 feet, and missed his par-saving putt, leaving it just on the edge of the cup. He walked up and nonchalantly stabbed at it, but he stubbed his putter and never touched the ball. After sweeping it in on the second try he immediately informed Barber that his score was a double-bogey 5.  

"I couldn't believe it,” said Barber, who was so thrown by the incident that he went on to three-putt for a bogey, though his lead still increased to three shots. “In my wildest imagination I wouldn't have known he had done it if he hadn't spoken up.’’ 

I saw this happen live on TV. When they came back after the commercial, the announcers were stunned that Palmer had added a stroke to his score. They showed the replay about 8 times of Arnie raking in the 1 inch putt, but there was nothing visual to show that the great man had made two motions. But he knew, so he told his rival to add an extra stroke on his scorecard.

Like Tiger today, Arnie was not getting any younger in 1984 and was running out of competitive time. Fortunately, he came back to win one more senior major the next year.

Tiger Woods should have withdrawn from The Masters

Tiger Woods, who has been stuck at 14 major championships, four back of Jack Nicklaus's record, since 2008, would likely be tied for the lead in the Masters tonight if his third shot Friday on the par-5 15th hole hadn't hit the flagstick (video) and rolled into the water. Instead, that bad break has cost him four shots (including three penalty strokes, two applied only this morning by tournament officials), and the disdain of many other pros, who think he should have done the honorable thing and withdrawn for signing an incorrect score card. 

Josh Levin protests in Slate against the country club rules-followers and their sick 19th Century Scottish hang-ups about honor and fair play:

In 1968, Roberto De Vicenzo shot a 65 in the final round of the Masters, tying him for the tournament lead. De Vicenzo’s partner, though, marked him down for a 4 rather than a 3 on the 17th hole, and the Argentine golfer didn’t notice the mistake before signing his scorecard. De Vicenzo was disqualified from the tournament, because golf is stupid. 

No, De Vicenzo was stuck with the score he signed for. As the vastly popular Argentine who won the previous year's British Open exclaimed, "What a stupid I am!" Playing partner Tommy Aaron was declared to be the guy you'd least like to have do your taxes.

Forty-five years later, golf is slightly less stupid, and that’s making a gallery’s worth of Bermuda-grass-huffing blowhards very angry. On Friday, Tiger Woods essentially pulled a De Vicenzo, unknowingly signing an incorrect scorecard. Rather than disqualify him—the equivalent of strapping Tiger into the electric chair for driving with a tail light out—Masters officials sensibly slapped him with a two-stroke penalty and allowed him to play on. 

That’s not good enough for CBS’ Nick Faldo. “He should really sit down and think about this and the mark this will leave on his career, his legacy, everything,” Faldo said on Saturday morning, declaring that it would be “the real manly thing” to voluntarily withdraw from the tournament. (Faldo walked back those comments during CBS' Saturday afternoon broadcast, perhaps because men in green jackets were standing off camera with tasers.) USA Today’s Christine Brennan wrote that “Woods' refusal to disqualify himself the moment he found out about his mistake forever changes his reputation, and the game's.” And CNN’s Piers Morgan wrote on Twitter: “Jack Nicklaus would disqualify himself in this situation. So would Arnold Palmer and Gary Player. Come on Tiger, do the right thing.” 

Given the self-evident wrongness of every position Piers Morgan has ever taken, perhaps there’s no need to press my case further. Even so, I’ll move on to a recap of Friday’s events. On the 15th hole, Woods’ ball hit the flagstick and bounced into the water, leading announcer David Feherty to shout that he’d been “royally cheated.” After a penalty stroke was added to his score, Woods took aim again, placing the ball a tiny bit behind its previous spot. A persnickety TV viewer quickly called this in as a possible violation. Masters officials reviewed it, decreed that Woods hadn’t violated any rules, and Tiger signed for a 71 on his scorecard. 

A post-round interview, though, led 19th-hole ethicists to set their Stimpmeters to GOLFCON 1. In that interview, Tiger said that he placed the ball “two yards further back” when he took his fifth shot on 15, acknowledging that he knowingly didn't place the ball "as nearly as possible" to the original spot.

The relevant rules are these:

If a ball is found in a water hazard or if it is known or virtually certain that a ball that has not been found is in the water hazard (whether the ball lies in water or not), the player may under penalty of one stroke: 

a. Proceed under the stroke and distance provision of Rule 27-1 by playing a ball as nearly as possible at the spot from which the original ball was last played (see Rule 20-5); or 

b. Drop a ball behind the water hazard, keeping the point at which the original ball last crossed the margin of the water hazard directly between the hole and the spot on which the ball is dropped, with no limit to how far behind the water hazard the ball may be dropped;

This was the very rare situation. Normally, if a ball struck precisely at the flag goes into the cross-hazard at 15, it's because it came up short. In that case, the golfer could choose between a) or b) and either drop it right where he'd played or walk straight backward to give him the ideal length. Woods apparently assumed that subrule b) applied so he walked back two yards so that his next shot would land two yards shorter. And he executed nicely and sank his putt for a bogey six. But b) didn't apply because the ball rebounded to the left off the pin, so if Woods wanted to play a longer shot he would have had to play from well to the left, where the angle was worse. So, he took the advantage by confounding a) and b).

Now, dropping the ball two yards farther back sounds like a minuscule infraction, but the advantage gained for somebody with Woods' stratospheric level of muscle memory is considerable. All he has to do is attempt to replicate the exact same swing and if he does, the result will give him a putt 6 feet shorter.

Clearly, Woods didn't realize he was breaking the rules, or he wouldn't have bragged after the round about the advantage he craftily gained from stepping two yards back. But, ignorance of the rules isn't an excuse at this level of golf.

Levin continues:

According to the chairman of the Masters’ competition committee, “such action would constitute playing from the wrong place”—a violation of USGA Rule 26-1. On account of this violation, Woods was penalized two shots, meaning the scorecard he’d signed immediately after his round was incorrect. So why wasn’t this golf scofflaw banished from Augusta National? Because two years ago, the USGA revised its rulebook, decreeing that a player need not be disqualified when “he has breached a Rule because of facts that he did not know and could not reasonably have discovered prior to returning his score card.”

But Tiger Woods didn’t just touch a few grains of sand with his club. After his round on Friday, he said that he’d moved his ball a couple of yards. This wasn’t just viewers calling him out—even if he didn’t know he was breaking the rules, Woods knew exactly where he’d placed his ball. "Based on the way the rules are written I don't see how he's anything other than a spectator,” former USGA executive director David Fay said before the Masters issued its less-punitive ruling. And even though Woods apparently didn’t know he was doing anything wrong—if he’d been purposefully cheating, why would he talk about it openly in an interview?—“ignorance is not an exception to the rule,” as Brad Faxon said on the Golf Channel on Saturday morning, arguing for Woods’ dismissal from the tournament. He continued: “We know that, and that’s the way it should be. We should know the rules and follow the rules.”

That's how tournament golf is supposed to work. A player is supposed to learn the rulebook (what, Tiger is too busy reading Proust to have read the rulebook?) and then police himself because he will sometimes find himself all alone on the course with only his conscience watching. If he later realizes he broke a rule, he would have up until the moment he signed his scorecard at the end of the round to call a penalty on himself.

If the signed scorecard is to his disadvantage, as in de Vincenzo's case in 1968 when playing partner Tommy Aaron wrote down a 4 when he made a 3, the signed scorecard stands. If the error on the signed scorecard is to his advantage, he is disqualified.

If the player realizes after signing the card that he misrembered the rules, then he should withdraw.

Granted, that's a huge penalty that might, conceivably, keep the 37-year-old Tiger Woods from his life's ambition of breaking Nicklaus's major championship record, but that's how golf is supposed to be played.

That line of thinking might sound reasonable if not for the holier-than-thou attitude that inevitably goes along with it.

In other words: Who? Whom? Josh Levin doesn't like the people who like golf's 19th Century Scottish Presbyterian ethos.

Golfers fetishize their adherence to the rules of the game, even—especially—the ones that don’t make sense. In 2010, Brian Davis cost himself a chance to win a PGA tournament when he called a penalty on himself for hitting a loose reed during his backswing. After the event, Davis was lauded for his honesty and compared to the great Bobby Jones, who gave himself a penalty in the 1925 U.S. Open when—out of sight of anyone else—he accidentally moved his ball a tiny bit. “You may as well praise a man for not robbing a bank,” Jones said afterwards, deflecting the praise. 

This is a golfer’s sense of proportionality: hitting a loose reed is no different than putting a hit on someone. Golfers are the opposite of conscientious objectors—they do whatever the rule makers tell them, with nary a thought given to what the rule is or why it exists. ...

But this is a sport that too often traffics in self-congratulation, and that prizes tradition over fairness. ... 

In other words, golfers should cheat whenever they can get away with it. Look how that ethos has made Wall Street such a moral exemplar that we all take their advice on things like illegal immigration as well. Americans loves a winner and weird WASP moral compunctions are so out of date. Instead of not praising a man for not robbing a bank, we should praise him for owning the bank and robbing the rest of us.

Hart-Risley Hypothesis: "Somebody grab my m**********' baby!"

The celebrated Hart-Risley Hypothesis that the school test score shortcomings of welfare children stem from their mothers not talking enough -- welfare children are exposed to 32 million fewer words by age four, we are frequently informed -- is back in the public eye with another video in the increasingly popular genre of Poor People on a Bus. As Hart-Risley advise, the mother does verbalize extensively, although those scholars might not fully approve of some of her vocalizations, such as "Somebody grab by m**********' baby." This request to the other transit passengers is intended to allow the mother to make good on her promise to another woman on the bus that "I will thrash you ... for disrespecting me in front of my baby."

Since nobody steps forward to grab her incest-inclined infant from her, at about 1:40 in the video the mother deftly executes a 1970s U. of Oklahoma Sooners wishbone-style pitchout to the surprised lady across the aisle, who, fortunately -- unlike star-crossed Heisman-winner Billy Sims in so many goal-to-go situations -- doesn't fumble.

A number of commenters have wondered why nobody on the bus suggests to the mother that her implementation of the Hart - Risley protocol that welfare mothers should talk more is lacking in a full, nuanced understanding of how best to foster her baby's cognitive development But, the other passengers had probably watched on World Star Hip Hop what had happened to Lefenus Pickett on a Philadelphia bus when he had critiqued a welfare mother's childrearing techniques.

Seriously, the increasing intensity of political correctness in the Serious Media probably has something to do with the spread in the Undernews of cellphone and security camera videos on sites like World Star Hip Hop.

Moreover, the growing conventional wisdom -- that society must, in effect, take poor children away from their blood relations for as many of their waking hours as possible -- may well be secretly motivated by these kind of videos as well.

Big Five Factors of entertainment tastes

Charles Spearman was one of the pioneers of factor analysis, a statistical technique for looking at what correlates with what and then trying to name the smaller number of underlying factors that emerge. He used it to come up with the g Factor theory of intelligence way back in 1904. Factor analysis is an interesting combination of objective and subjective, because the final step of giving names to the most important underlying structures is a creative one.

Here's a study looking at the top five factors in entertainment tastes.

Listening, Watching, and Reading: The Structure and Correlates of Entertainment Preferences 

Peter J. Rentfrow, Lewis R. Goldberg, and Ran Zilca 

The publisher's final edited version of this article is available at J Pers 

People spend considerable amounts of time and money listening to music, watching TV and movies, and reading books and magazines, yet almost no attention in psychology has been devoted to understanding individual differences in preferences for such entertainment. The present research was designed to examine the structure and correlates of entertainment genre preferences. Analyses of the genre preferences of over 3,000 individuals revealed a remarkably clear factor structure. Using multiple samples, methods, and geographic regions, data converged to reveal five entertainment-preference dimensions: Communal, Aesthetic, Dark, Thrilling, and Cerebral. Preferences for these entertainment dimensions were uniquely related to demographics and personality traits. Results also indicated that personality accounted for significant proportions of variance in entertainment preferences over and above demographics. The results provide a foundation for developing and testing hypotheses about the psychology of entertainment preferences.

Staffan's Personality Blog summarizes:

Next, they did their statistical mojo in which correlations between all the 108 genres were compared to see if they clustered into any separate factors, which they did. The major divide was found between what the researchers, surprisingly politically incorrect called Highbrow and Lowbrow. Furthermore Highbrow turned out to consist of two separate factors, named Aesthetic and Cerebral where as Lowbrow was made up of three factors called Communal, Dark and Thrilling for a total of five factors – two fancy and three folksy. To get a general idea of what these factors look like here are some of the major items in each of them,

Highbrow 

Aesthetic – classical music, arts and humanities TV shows, art books, opera music, foreign film, classic films, folk music, world music, philosophy books 

Cerebral – business books, news and current events TV shows and books, educational TV shows, reference books, computer books, documentary films, science TV shows 

Lowbrow 

Communal – romance films, romance books, daytime talk shows, made-for- TV movies, soap operas, reality shows, pop music 

Dark – horror movies, heavy metal music, rap and hip hop, alternative music, erotic movies, erotic literature, cult movies 

Thrilling – action movies, thriller and espionage books, spy shows, science fiction TV shows, films and books, suspense movies, war movies

The name "communal" was chosen to distinguish it from the other two lowbrow factors, which cluster together to form a "rebellious" grouping. "Communal" could probably better be entitled "Relationship" entertainment aimed at women who are most interested in personal relationships.

The Cerebral factor might better be named "Informative." It sounds a lot like entertainment for what I call Frequent Flyers: people with management and technical jobs who travel a lot on business and like information. James Michener rather than John Updike. (My favorite Updike novel is The Coup, which imparts a Michener-worthy load of information about Africa in Updike's deliriously aesthetic style.) Airport bookstores and newsstands cater to their interests. Humorist Dave Barry, who is from Armonk, NY, home of IBM, is the poet laureate of Frequent Flyers. 

It would be interesting to drill down further within this group to see if the nerds and managers can be distinguished. Adding sports would help. Management types tend to like to play team sports and watch spectator sports. Nerds are less interested in watching sports and are more interested in less structured outdoor activities, such as, say, kayaking.

Mark Zuckerberg's cheap labor lobby

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has put together an immigration pressure group entitled fwd.us. A week ago Politico recounted Zuckerberg aide Joe Green's memo:

Under a section called “our tactical assets,” the prospectus lists three reasons why “people in tech” can be organized into “one of the most powerful political forces.” 

“1: We control massive distribution channels, both as companies and individuals. We saw the tip of the iceberg with SOPA/PIPA. 

“2: “Our voice carries a lot of weight because we are broadly popular with Americans. 

“3. We have individuals with a lot of money. If deployed properly this can have huge influence in the current campaign finance environment.”

This week, Zuckerberg op-edizes in the Washington Post:

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: Immigration and the knowledge economy

By Mark Zuckerberg, Published: April 10 

Mark Zuckerberg is founder and chief executive of Facebook and co-founder of Fwd.us. 

Earlier this year I started teaching a class on entrepreneurship at an after-school program in my community. The middle-school students put together business plans, made their products and even got an opportunity to sell them. 

One day I asked my students what they thought about going to college. One of my top aspiring entrepreneurs told me he wasn’t sure that he’d be able to go to college because he’s undocumented. His family is from Mexico, and they moved here when he was a baby. Many students in my community are in the same situation; they moved to the United States so early in their lives that they have no memories of living anywhere else. 

These students are smart and hardworking, and they should be part of our future. 

This is, after all, the American story. My great-grandparents came through Ellis Island. My grandfathers were a mailman and a police officer. My parents are doctors. I started a company. None of this could have happened without a welcoming immigration policy, a great education system and the world’s leading scientific community that created the Internet. 

Today’s students should have the same opportunities — but our current system blocks them. 

We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants. And it’s a policy unfit for today’s world. 

The economy of the last century was primarily based on natural resources, industrial machines and manual labor. Many of these resources were zero-sum and controlled by companies. If someone else had an oil field, then you did not. 

There were only so many oil fields, and only so much wealth could be created from them. 

Today’s economy is very different. It is based primarily on knowledge and ideas — resources that are renewable and available to everyone. Unlike oil fields, someone else knowing something doesn’t prevent you from knowing it, too.

It's not like the bad old days when some robber baron would get a monopoly and squeeze his workers. Thus, today, not just Facebook but also MySpace, Friendster, and Google + are all flourishing. What's good for Mark Zuckerberg is good for all Americans.

In fact, the more people who know something, the better educated and trained we all are, the more productive we become, and the better off everyone in our nation can be.

This can change everything. In a knowledge economy, the most important resources are the talented people we educate and attract to our country. A knowledge economy can scale further, create better jobs and provide a higher quality of living for everyone in our nation. ...

That’s why I am proud to announce FWD.us, a new organization founded by leaders of our nation’s technology community to focus on these issues and advocate a bipartisan policy agenda to build the knowledge economy the United States needs to ensure more jobs, innovation and investment. 

These leaders, who reflect the breadth and depth of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial culture, include Reid Hoffman, Eric Schmidt, Marissa Mayer, Drew Houston, Ron Conway, Chamath Palihapitiya, Joe Green, Jim Breyer, Matt Cohler, John Doerr, Paul Graham, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi. 

On the new fwd.us webpage entitled "Our Supporters," there are additional names of more tech heavyweights: Bryan Chesky, Chris Cox, Reed Hastings, Chad Hurley, Josh James, Max Levchin, Joe Lonsdale, Andrew Mason, Dave Morin, Elon Musk, Hadi Partovi, Alison Pincus, Mark Pincus, Keith Rabois, Hosain Rahman,  David Sacks, Eric Schmidt, Kevin Systrom, Padmasree Warrior, and Fred Wilson.

That's three dozen names.

Has anybody else noticed that not a single one of those surnames is Spanish?

Silicon Valley is so non-Hispanic that Zuckerberg couldn't even come up with some Conquistador-American to stick on his "Our Supporters" page.

Maybe he should make friends with Eduardo Saverin again?

How many people have noticed that there are virtually no Hispanic tech wizards in Silicon Valley?

The San Jose Mercury-News had to sue to extract the diversity data from big Silicon Valley firms. They found what merely eyeballing the endless business coverage of Silicon Valley ought to suggest: virtually no blacks or Hispanics make it big there.

Of the 5,907 top managers and officials in the Silicon Valley offices of the 10 large companies in 2005, 296 were black or Hispanic, a 20 percent decline from 2000, according to U.S. Department of Labor work-force data obtained by the Mercury News through a Freedom of Information request.

Crying Indian crying over Joshua Tree graffiti

Joshua Tree National Park is another rock climbing / bouldering site, a vast version of Stoney Point. I went scrambling over the boulders with my father on New Year's Day weekend 1965-66 when I was 7. From today's LA Times, a perfect illustration of my posts  (first and second) a couple of days ago about graffiti, littering, and racial shaming:

Historic Joshua Tree sites blighted by city's ills 

Vandals are using social media to get others to join in. Rattlesnake Canyon and Barker Dam are temporarily closed.

By Phil Willon, Los Angeles Times

JOSHUA TREE — Along the saw-toothed ridge of Rattlesnake Canyon, crude graffiti invades the crevices that offered shade to nomadic Indians trekking across the Mojave hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago. 

"Skunk,'' "oatmeal cookie" and "punx" are scribbled in black spray paint on giant, earth-crushing boulders where ancient petroglyphs may have been etched by the Serrano and Chemehuevi. 

The damage goes far beyond a few lovey-dovey teenagers carving their initials into picnic tables. Vandalism in Rattlesnake Canyon and at Barker Dam, two of Joshua Tree National Park's most popular hiking spots, has been so pervasive that both sites have been closed to the public. 

The graffiti in Rattlesnake Canyon, which meanders for a mile through the northern edge of Joshua Tree's Wonderland of Rocks, started with just a few markings but quickly became rampant. Vandals bragged of their handiwork on social media sites such as Facebook, attracting their like-minded friends to the same spot, paint in hand, park service officials said. 

In all, 17 areas of the canyon have been defaced by graffiti, including several historic Native American cultural spots. 

... Park service law enforcement agents are investigating the vandalism at both sites, Pilcher said, adding that anyone convicted of defacing a national park could be sentenced to six months in jail and fined up to $5,000. The penalty could be much stiffer for those convicted of vandalizing a historic Native American site, he said. ...

For local Native American tribes, the defacing of historic sites at Joshua Tree just adds to the cultural losses they have suffered since Spanish missionaries first arrived in the 1700s. 

The spring-fed Oasis of Mara, near the park's north entrance, was a popular resting spot for several tribal clans as they journeyed across the desert toward the coast, and Native American rock drawings are scattered across the vast 800,000-acre park. 

"That whole area was Serrano territory," said Jacob Coin, spokesman for the San Manuel Band of Serrano Mission Indians in Highland. "It's a disappointment not just for Native people, but for all of the state."

You can see what the L.A. Times reporter is trying to do: play the racial guilt card -- so successfully played in the 1971 "Crying Indian" anti-littering PSA -- to get Latinos to stop painting their stupid graffiti on beautiful cliffs. I'm all for it, but what a triple bankshot we're stuck with attempting to pull off in 2013! How many of these teenage idiots ever saw that ancient American TV spot? How many of these mestizos care about some myth made up by Burson Marsteller in New York about indio environmentalism?

What they would care about is being called out as Mexican vandals. These are some of the same folks who drive drunkenly around the Rose Bowl honking their horns for three or four hours after every Mexican national soccer team victory over the American team. They are proud of being Mexican and might even feel a little ashamed of the shame they are bringing on Mexicans with their bad habits ... if anybody were ever to mention it. But of course to mention how Mexicans mess up the American environment like this would be Racist Hate. To even notice this is evil and to prove that you didn't notice it, you have to want to import millions more Mexicans.

Where it really matters

The Washington Post editorial board has drawn a line in the sand against anti-white black solidarity, at least where it really matters: Washington D.C. city council elections.

Anita Bonds’ misguided focus on race 

By Editorial Board

D.C. COUNCIL member Anita Bonds (D-At Large) is not the first District official, nor sadly is she likely to be the last, to try to use race to her advantage. But her awkward comments about the role that race will play in the city’s upcoming election and voters wanting their “own” should not go unchallenged. 

Ms. Bonds appeared Monday on WAMU-FM’s “Kojo Nnamdi Show” with the five other candidates vying for the citywide seat in the April 23 special election. She was asked about recent comments by a union official endorsing her. The official said there is a strong desire within the black community that the seat be held by an African American. 

“Happy to hear that,” was Ms. Bonds’s response. She said, “People want to have their leadership reflect who they are” and longtime residents “fear” being pushed out by the city’s changing demographics. “The majority of the District of Columbia is African American. . . . There is a natural tendency to want your own,” she said.

The horror, the horror. Seriously, that's a perfectly reasonable thing for any politician to say. But, it's not okay with the Washington Post editorial board. This stuff's personal. If they help push blacks out of power in Washington D.C. their lives will be a lot better, so they are going to be as anti-black as they gotta be to get the job done.

Ms. Bonds, The Post’s Tim Craig reported, appears to be trying to rally black voters to her bid by noting that the council, now with seven white and six black members, has never had eight white members. 

But, it will soon, at least in the Washington Post editorial board's dreams of cashing in big on their real estate investments.

Ms. Bonds told us she is aghast that anyone would interpret her remarks as a plea to vote for her solely because of her race; she said she was merely expressing appreciation about having received the union endorsement. Her spokesman stressed that the campaign has never used race as a basis to garner votes and that the council member was simply responding to a direct question that should not be taken out of context. ... 

 But the failure of Ms. Bonds to make clear that a candidate’s skin color should not be the determining factor was disappointing, particularly since the council on which she hopes to continue to serve will have to deal with challenges confronting a city undergoing dramatic demographic change. 

Translation from Editorialese: Challenges to include blacks not letting the doorknob hit them on the butt as they leave D.C. for places where the locals don't have their hands on The Megaphone like we do here at the Washington Post.

NYT: Black people don't talk enough

That's why so few poor black youths grow up to be rappers. Society must do whatever it takes to close the Rap Gap.

From the New York Times, an extract of straight 2013 Conventional Wisdom, 99 and 44/100ths percent pure:

The Power of Talking to Your Baby 

By TINA ROSENBERG 

By the time a poor child is 1 year old, she has most likely already fallen behind middle-class children in her ability to talk, understand and learn. The gap between poor children and wealthier ones widens each year, and by high school it has become a chasm. American attempts to close this gap in schools have largely failed, and a consensus is starting to build that these attempts must start long before school — before preschool, perhaps even before birth.

Up to eight months and 29 days before birth, but not a day sooner!

There is no consensus, however, about what form these attempts should take, because there is no consensus about the problem itself. What is it about poverty that limits a child’s ability to learn? Researchers have answered the question in different ways: Is it exposure to lead? Character issues like a lack of self-control or failure to think of future consequences? The effects of high levels of stress hormones? The lack of a culture of reading? 

A poor child is likely to hear millions fewer words at home than a child from a professional family. And the disparity matters. 

Another idea, however, is creeping into the policy debate: that the key to early learning is talking — specifically, a child’s exposure to language spoken by parents and caretakers from birth to age 3, the more the better. It turns out, evidence is showing, that the much-ridiculed stream of parent-to-child baby talk — Feel Teddy’s nose! It’s so soft! Cars make noise — look, there’s a yellow one! Baby feels hungry? Now Mommy is opening the refrigerator! — is very, very important. (So put those smartphones away!) 

The idea has been successfully put into practice a few times on a small scale, but it is about to get its first large-scale test, in Providence, R.I., which last month won the $5 million grand prize in Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge, beating 300 other cities for best new idea. In Providence, only one in three children enter school ready for kindergarten reading.

When I entered kindergarten, not only was I not ready for kindergarten reading, but there was no reading in kindergarten. At some point during kindergarten, I learned how to read at home, and happily read for a couple of weeks. But then I got bored with reading and went back to poking things with sticks or whatever it was I found more fascinating. When I started first grade, the educationally system started to teach me how to read, and I picked it up within a couple of weeks.

The city already has a network of successful programs in which nurses, mentors, therapists and social workers regularly visit pregnant women, new parents and children in their homes, providing medical attention and advice, therapy, counseling and other services. Now Providence will train these home visitors to add a new service: creating family conversation.

The Providence Talks program will be based on research by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley at the University of Kansas, who in 1995 published a book, “Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children.” (see here for a summary.) Hart and Risley were studying how parents of different socioeconomic backgrounds talked to their babies. Every month, the researchers visited the 42 families in the study and recorded an hour of parent-child interaction. They were looking for things like how much parents praised their children, what they talked about, whether the conversational tone was positive or negative. Then they waited till the children were 9, and examined how they were doing in school. In the meantime, they transcribed and analyzed every word on the tapes — a process that took six years. “It wasn’t until we’d collected our data that we realized that the important variable was how much talking the parents were doing,” Risley told an interviewer later. 

All parents gave their children directives like “Put away your toy!” or “Don’t eat that!” But interaction was more likely to stop there for parents on welfare, while as a family’s income and educational levels rose, those interactions were more likely to be just the beginning. 

The disparity was staggering. Children whose families were on welfare heard about 600 words per hour. Working-class children heard 1,200 words per hour, and children from professional families heard 2,100 words. By age 3, a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words in his home environment than a child from a professional family. And the disparity mattered: the greater the number of words children heard from their parents or caregivers before they were 3, the higher their IQ and the better they did in school. TV talk not only didn’t help, it was detrimental. 

Hart and Risley later wrote that children’s level of language development starts to level off when it matches that of their parents — so a language deficit is passed down through generations. They found that parents talk much more to girls than to boys (perhaps because girls are more sociable, or because it is Mom who does most of the care, and parents talk more to children of their gender). 

This might explain why young, poor boys have particular trouble in school. And they argued that the disparities in word usage correlated so closely with academic success that kids born to families on welfare do worse than professional-class children entirely because their parents talk to them less. In other words, if everyone talked to their young children the same amount, there would be no racial or socioeconomic gap at all. (Some other researchers say that while word count is extremely important, it can’t be the only factor.)

But those researchers are obviously wrong, and probably racist.

While we do know that richer, more educated parents talk much more to their children than poorer and less educated ones, we don’t know exactly why. A persuasive answer comes from Meredith Rowe, now an assistant professor at the University of Maryland. She found that poor women were simply unaware that it was important to talk more to their babies — no one had told them about this piece of child development research. Poorer mothers tend to depend on friends and relatives for parenting advice, who may not be up on the latest data. Middle-class mothers, on the other hand, get at least some of their parenting information from books, the Internet and pediatricians. Talking to baby has become part of middle-class culture; it seems like instinct, but it’s not. 

If you haven’t heard of Hart and Risley’s work, you are not alone — and you may be wondering why. These findings should have created a policy whirlwind: Here was a revolutionary way to reduce inequities in school achievement that seemed actually possible. How hard could it be to persuade poor parents to talk to their children more? ...

Providence has the money to be more ambitious. The city plans to begin enrolling families in January, 2014, and hopes to eventually reach about 2,000 new families each year, said Mayor Angel Taveras. It will most likely work with proven home-visitation programs like the Nurse-Family Partnership. The visitors will show poor families with very young children how to use the recorders, and ask them to record one 16-hour day each month. 

Every month they will return to share information about the results and specific strategies for talking more: how do you tell your baby about your day? What’s the best way to read to your toddler? They will also talk about community resources, like read-aloud day at the library. And they will work with the family to set goals for next month. The city also hopes to recruit some of the mothers and fathers as peer educators. 

And when that fails, what's next? Intensive pre-pre-schools where Brown U. grads will be employed to speak to black babies using words they learned getting their Brown degrees like "intersubjectivity" and "phallocentrism?"

Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World” and the World War II spy story e-book “D for Deception.”

Meanwhile, Steve "Freakonomics" Levitt and Roland Fryer of Harvard have finally, after a half dozen years, found a journal to publish their old study showing that black babies have higher IQs than Asian babies at eight months to twelve months. Of course, they don't actually have an IQ test for infants, but their little test of baby liveliness is practically just as good! See the comments on Marginal Revolution for a discussion.