Brooks sets out to share his wisdom on the root causes of America’s past success and why we’re faltering of late. He writes: As Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz describe in their book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” America’s educational progress was amazingly steady over those decades, and the U.S. opened up a gigantic […]

The debate over at The American Scene on Jim Manzi’s article “Undetermined” is now closed to comments so I couldn’t respond to one of the comments but the beauty of being a blogger is that you can use your own forum to vent your response. The comment that I desperately wanted to respond to was […]

The former Miss Singapore, Cheryl Marie Cordeiro, now domiciled in Sweden, takes a crack at analyzing the Watson Affair. She’s clearly not a reactionary in that she tries to understand what Watson was saying and she goes to some effort to look at background information but along the way she falls into many of the […]

Dissent has published an article on how pro-choice advocates should start thinking about the prospects of designer babies and the author broaches the subject of regulating, and perhaps prohibiting, access to such procedures. What’s striking about the article is the heavy reliance on the “barn door effect” wherein pro-choice advocates, once through the barn door, […]

Tim Krueger writing in the Cornell Daily Sun focuses on the higher admissions hurdles that Asian applicants to Cornell face and advocates that something be done about this injustice. By his back of the envelope calculations: In the interest of space I’ll put the calculations on The Sun website instead of here. The figure I […]

You would think that the New York Times reporters on the education beat could write an article without blatantly proclaiming their gullibility or willingness to engage in obfuscation but I see no evidence of any desire to avoid such sins, especially in this article on how school districts are pursuing diversity agendas by parsing students […]

I’m having some trouble deciphering the economic principles underlying the following argument that Mark Thoma made regarding economic inequality: As for inflation, in general, if wage growth equals inflation plus productivity growth, there is no inflation pressure. Now I understand an argument which allocates to wages the productivity growth derived from more efficient workplace practices […]

Will Wright of The Sims and SimCity fame has been developing his new game Spore for over 6 years and the canvas he’s painting on is large indeed for the game begins with the player controlling the evolution of cells within a tidal pool and it progresses up the evolutionary ladder, with intermediate stops at […]

We’re reading a lot lately about how the producers of Borat set up ordinary citizens in order to mock them in the film and here we see how Sacha Baron-Cohen likes having the tables turned on him as his “cousin” Horat crashes the L.A. premiere and ambush interviews him. Sacha Baron-Cohen enters the clip at […]

The Cylon home world has been discovered – it’s Earth, and the Cylon nexus is Japan. The Japanese drive to avoid the societal turmoil that often accompanies immigration has made them world leaders in robotic technology as they seek to develop robots to do the work of low-skill immigrants. Their latest models are startlingly human-like. […]

If you’re a Romanian who wants to get into Canada, but you’re already on their watch lists because they’ve deported you before and intercepted you on your other attempts to enter the country illegally, what to do? Why that’s simple, flank the enemy and make your run for the weakest border front, so buy an […]

The International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare has seen fit to advance the state of humanity’s knowledge by publishing the article “Deconstructing The Evidence-Based Discourse In Health Sciences: Truth, Power And Fascism” in their latest issue: Background Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, the objective of this paper is to […]

This month Nature Reviews:Neuroscience published an opinion piece “Gene-environment interactions in psychiatry: joining forces with neuroscience” by Avshalom Caspi and Terrie E. Moffitt who follow-up on their well-cited 2002 article in Science “Role of genotype in the cycle of violence in maltreated children.” In the opinion piece the authors present a broad overview of the […]

Steve has already reported on the issues that New Jersey State Police are having with an ever rising number of women and minority applicants who are applying for positions but who are disproportionately failing the background checks, physical exams and written tests. But what happens when some of these applicants do pass the tests? Another […]

Great juxtaposition of Monty Python storyline with Star Trek clips, but how much time do you think it must have taken to cull through 3 years worth of Star Trek episodes looking for just the right snippets to fit in with the Monty Python sketch? Congratulations to the creators for their imagination and most of […]

It’s not really surprising to see that some stereotypes are in fact based on reality. If you’re seeking to confirm the stereotype of the all-empathy feminist who spouts Leftist dogma and does so in a fashion that garbles the rules of logic, then look no further than this essay from the law-student blogger who publishes […]

What was going on in Germany in April of 2001 that so distracted people that many of them forgot to get busy making babies that month? And when the sudden forgetfulness was likely noted shortly after January of 2002, did the Germans feel guilty and make a concerted effort to get back on track by […]

Can anyone beat the number of authors of this paper entitled Top Quark Mass Measurement from Dilepton Events at CDF II with the Matrix-Element Method? I counted 729. Hat tip ChicagoBoyz

This is too good not to share – Razib takes on the persona of a more “enlightened” being. Could this be a Sokal Hoax in the making or have we lost Razib, as he transcends to a higher plane of being? but don’t you worry about the perpetuation of heteronormative discourse in a society where […]

The next time you encounter Lewontin’s Fallacy in which someone is arguing that between groups differences are not important when compared to the variation within the group, one should discern how they feel about race and gender wage differentials, for: It is important to recognize that most wage inequality occurs within and not between groups. […]