We can put colors on various sorts of exact quantitative continuums. 
 
If we take the color "yellow" and look at its R:G:B composition, we might see the following: 250:250:0. If we take this composition as defining yellow, then what do we label the following composition: 250:225:0? Is that orange yet? Or do we feel that orange is best defined as 250:150:0? 
 
The point is that we're dealing with fuzzy boundaries when we deal with color, and the same applies to race. We can parallel your process of infinitesimalizing the human bio-diversity spectrum by doing the same to color, that is, yellow is only defined as 250:250:0 and we must refer to 250:249:0 as something other than yellow. Why, other than for ideological reasons, would we abandon very useful concepts with fuzzy boundaries? Lots of people understand that the color yellow applies to a range of the spectrum, not just one finite point on the spectrum. Similarly, people understand the broad continental categorization of racial groups while simultaneously understanding that we can define race down to finer and finer groups. The fuzzy boundaries don't invalidate the concepts of race and color.

How many races are there, Jason? 
 
How many colors are there, John? If you can't give me a definitive and finite answer, then should we abandon the usage of the word color? 
 
We have not seen millions of people murdered in the name of evolution, 
 
We did though have millions of people murdered in the name of class, so should we dismantle the Democratic Party due to it's penchant for engaging in class politics, and should we abandon all forms of study predicated on class? That might be the safest bet if we apply your reasoning consistently, for you seem to be arguing that the past is prologue.

The qualitative feminist argument about fewer women than men in high-prestige positions is quite good, in my opinion. 
 
I don't share you opinion. You might bring me on-side if you can offer convincing evidence to show that the professoriate in physics, math and engineering is more dastardly sexist than the professoriate of medical schools, law schools, psychology departments, etc which also used to be male-dominated but are now characterized by substantial female presence.

So I'm just wondering what policies Tangoman would proactively (sorry :) advocate instead of respond to once they are already in place. 
 
Here's policy that I would advocate in the field of education: All students, upon entering grade school, and regularly thereafter, are tested on ability to master a lesson plan. The results on such tests determine whether they are placed in a school with a normal school day or one with an extended school day. While this scheme is geared to test the individual student the resulting parsing, based on test results, would most definitely show group differences. 
 
As the KIPP schools have shown, troubled students can achieve content mastery if they are in school for two hours more per day, go to school on Saturdays, and have their school years extended by an additional month. This added time on task brings these students to the same benchmarks as the students who don't experience difficulty with the curriculum in the traditional school time frame. The troubled students have slower information uptake rates. They can't be accommodated in classrooms geared to students with faster information uptake rates and still achieve comparable content mastery. 
 
Currently we hold to the fantasy that all students can process information at the same, or very similar, rates and can thus achieve mastery of basic principles taught them during the school day. By holding to this fantasy we see disastrous performance disparities across groups. I'd advocate that we abandon the fantasy and focus on educating the children even if it means acknowledging that the students who don't pass the screening test have to face longer school days, school weeks and school years. At the end the goal is to produce an educated student, not a student with high self-esteem who hasn't mastered their grade-level content. 
 
The policy can surely be tweaked to the nth degree to insure that students can transfer between streams as their performance increases or decreases but what will be impossible to hide is the composition of the groups. 
 
This policy would be a first step in that it probably would have little effect on high achieving students but it would at least address the issue of mastering basic content, which should be achievable for almost every student, but as is clearly the case, this basic goal is not being met.

So I'm just wondering what policies Tangoman would proactively (sorry :) advocate instead of respond to once they are already in place. 
 
The point of my post was to critique the comment left by Joe Shipman in which he expresses severe disapproval of the notion of crafting public policy on the basis of group differences, in that he believes it unjust due to the fact that measured variance is greater within the group than between groups. If he holds to this position then I would expect him to also call for efforts to dismantle initiatives which are designed to close the wage gap between men and women or between blacks and whites, in that here too we see that the wage variance is greater within the group of women or blacks than it is between women and men or between blacks and whites. How come most liberals don't have a problem on this point? 
 
All I'm asking for is some intellectual consistency. Pick one side and work with it, but don't condemn one instance of group differences forming the basis of public policy and then embrace another instance formed on the same principles.  
 
Sure, I understand that when liberals advocate closing wage gaps they feel that they're on the side of justice and affirming the spirits of the folks that they're setting out to help by boosting their salaries and these actions justify abandoning principle but in the case of education they can't achieve the same feel-good dynamics and thus it's easier to condemn the use of group level factors when formulating public policy. 
 
That simply doesn't sit well with me. If the rules of the game allow for group level factors to inform public policy then let's apply them uniformly and if group factors are deemed unacceptable, then here too we should apply the dictate uniformly. I can live with either approach, but the hypocrisy of embracing group factors in favored instances and then rejecting them in disfavored instances simply rubs me the wrong way.

There is a lot of diversity in Canadian universities, but not all groups are represented proportionately. 
 
13.4% of Canada's population consist of visible minorities with 4%-5% Asian compared to 3% Black and 0.7% Latin Americans, and most of this population consists of recent immigrants who've entered through a stringent screening process. US universities aren't having much trouble with recent African or Caribbean immigrants either. 
 
The problem that Canadian universities don't face is a large population of low performing minorities demanding representation in universities.

I resubmitted my post with my e-mail address removed, and your system reinserted it for me! 
 
That is your browser pulling the info from your cache.

Conan O'Brien?

So let me be clear that as far as the conventional/American model, not only do I think its arbitrary, I also think it doesn't cluster. 
 
With that noted, let me state why I think arbitrariness is a problem for any attempt to divide humanity into categories at a global level. It's a problem because the arbitrary categories that are defended tend to be the ones that most resemble the conventional model of race. To me (and many others), this makes it look like people are trying to "slice the pie" of human variation in the way that most resembles their prejudices.  
 
That's a tight little tautology you've constructed there. 
 
You initially define a racial framework to be arbitrary and then you reach your conclusion that such a framework should be rejected because it's arbitrary. Bravo. 
 
Secondarily, your rejection is thoroughly immersed in your idiosyncratic view on the motivation of others who find utility in using race in their analysis.  
 
I see no way of piercing your position, and I find the rigor of your reasoning to be unconvincing, so I'll take a pass on being convinced.

ben g 
 
My objection is not that they don't cluster, but rather, that they are arbitrary, and in the end based on history and appearance more than science. 
 
Do you hold similar objections to the arbitrary, fuzzy definitions that are associated with the concepts of family and color? 
 
Where are the exact demarcation lines that categorize people into a family grouping and what is the exact spectral boundary of the color blue? Further, would you argue that a color that is a few wavelengths off the boundary is not blue, even though most everyone would classify it as being within the fuzzy boundary of blue?

Looks like a young, single male. How likely is it that a married father of two would be able to find the time and persevere in repeated practice to accompish such a virtuoso performance?

Don't know much about Transformers, but that looks like a Shrike to me.

I think that there is a simplistic modeling going on in that it is posited that majority rule is a necessary condition to change the vector of a society. From this premise we would of course expect that people's concerns would focus on how quickly the 50% threshold would be crossed for that would signal the change of societal orientation. 
 
However, long before 50% population is ever achieved we could see Millet style governance instituted to satisfy a growing Muslim constituency. Already we see that large sections of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and other large European cities are under Muslim self-government. Cleaving off sections of cities, or countries, is the present day manifestation of the "50% Fear" and with growing population proportionalism, if not abated by growing rates of assimilation, the native culture will continue to lose influence in the future.

haf, 
 
I added the related post in anticipation of your hypothesis.

What are the units of the horizontal axis? Percent? 
 
Yes.

its a case between a very low risk of nuclear war and a high risk of convential war. 
 
Ohhh, that's a good one that I'll have to use sometime.

I think you're on to something with the tests vs. homework and what determines grades. 
 
Check out this table from the Univ. of Cal. Note that the predictive validity of HS GPA fell from 0.17 in 1996 to 0.119 in 1999, while SAT-I fell from 0.138 to 0.133, and SAT-II fell from 0.164 to 0.154, over the same period.  
 
What's happening to the predictive validity of HS GPA? Why is there a growing disconnect between grades and content mastery, as measured by standardized tests? 
 
I will say this though, I had a LOT of male friends who thought they knew what they were doing, didn't bother to do their homework, and then bombed out on the tests too. 
 
No doubt it was male bravado - something about not wanting to work as diligently as the girls so as to master the material taught to them. In a sense, they are given enough rope, and they end up hanging themselves by not doing the homework. Stupid boys, and it's no one's fault but their own. The problem is that the reward structure for doing one's homework is built into the grading system and it needs to be separated out, so that grades start, once again, to act as a measure of content mastery, rather than a partial reflection on diligence, obedience, etc.

Sydney, 
 
I'm not sure I believe that boys are falling behind soley because resourses have been distributed away from them to girls (if they are indeed falling behind at all). Could there be social factors involved as well?  
 
I agree. There are social factors centered within boy peer groups, others centered on family expectations and aspirations, and yet others centered on institutional philosophies. Clearly, schools can't do much to change family and personal behavior, but it is well within their power to undo, or modify, the policies they implemented over the last 10-15 years as a response to the girl-crisis. Just a for instance - we know that there is a gender gap on successful completion of homework assignments. Something is going on in the minds of many boys where they resist compliance and justify it with "why bother when I already know the material." So, testing time comes around and content mastery is up to par. Fast forward to the end of the course and the grading policies are partially rewarding compliance with process which has little effect on content mastery. Sure, we all understand that homework is a process to reinforce lessons and is a useful task. However, the awarding of grades to the task is the problem. 
 
Another point that schools could address is to stop the active campaign of removing male role models from instructional materials. 
 
It's these types of tactics that have gone too far that underlie much of the institutional culpability on this issue. 
 
2) Shouldn't the ultimate goal be to optimize the distribution of educational resourses in a way that maximizes the benefits to society, and not worry about the gender (or race) of the individual receiving the education as much? Caveat: I have no idea how one would do this. 
 
ISTM, that the heart of this conundrum is the age-old battle between planned economy vs. invisible hand. If we let each individual rise to their level of competence then that likely serves society better than trying to apportion education resources in some philosophical way to achieve a planned outcome of some sorts. 
 
3) Every advance that a girl makes does not produce an equal and opposite decrement in male performance. This is not a zero sum game.  
 
Agree. I think what troubles people about this issue, and this really should resonate with feminists, is the creation of hostile environments within schools. Male behavior being pathologized. Over the last few decades we've seen an explosion in the rates of males being sent to remedial classes, being labeled ADHD, being chastized for being competitive, etc . . you know the litany of issues. 
 
In terms of zero sums, consider the issues surrounding choice of literature. Studies have shown that boys have a far greater disinterest in reading books which are particularly appealing to girls
More....

"like giving points on Math tests for proper spelling." 
 
Do you have a link to that? 
 
Google it up. Here's one syllabus for a High School Math class that I found: 
 
Journals: You must write a minimum of 4 sentences of their thoughts and opinions about your reading and their work. Make specific references to the information you have read and the web sites you have visited when going to the links from the MathApplications pages. You must write 5 journals each quarter. 
 
Video Reactions: You are expected to watch selected television programs on Hawaii Public Television, The Learning Channel (TLC), or The Discovery Channel (DSC). You should choose 2 television shows per quarter that have information on mathematics or science (based on the title of the program) and write a report (approximately 150 words) for each program describing what you learned from the program. Some suggestions are How'd They do That, Movie Magic, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Science Mysteries, Strange Science 
 
Projects: You are expected to create 2 projects per quarter. These projects may involve drawings, calculations, and/or designs. Each project is described in the chapter for the particular quarter. 
 
Tests: There is one test per quarter. The test questions are on the MathApplications webpages and links from the MathApplications website, scattered throughout the reading and pictures. 
 
And, as in all of your school work, correct spelling is expected! 
 
Grading is as follows: 
 
5 Journals at 20 points each= 100 points total 
 
2 Video Reactions at 50 points each = 100 points total 
 
2 Projects at 50 points each = 100 points total 
 
1 Test at 100 points = 100 points total

a report from the nonpartisan group Education Sector 
 
Phew! That was funny - let me wipe the tears from my eyes. Non-partisan she says: 
 
Sara Mead: Senior Policy Analyst - Mead was an education policy analyst with the Progressive Policy Institute, where she remains a non-resident fellow. She has also worked for the U.S. Department of Education and the Gore 2000 Presidential Campaign. 
 
Andrew J. Rotherham: Founder - Rotherham previously served at The White House as Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy. . . and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. . . . In addition, he serves on advisory boards and committees for numerous organizations and institutions including the American Academy for Liberal Education, The Broad Foundation, Citizens Commission on Civil Rights, Common Good, . . . 
 
Elena Silva: Senior Policy Analyst - Silva comes to Education Sector after four years as the director of research for the Association of American University Women, where she led a number of national research projects on gender equity in education and the workplace. 
 
It's also very interesting how they disproportionately devote a lot of good news time to the scores of 9 year olds, a time when environmental uniformity is easier to maintain compared to the divergence we see from older teens.  
 
over the past three decades, boys' test scores are mostly up, more boys are going to college and more are getting bachelor's degrees. 
 
Well, let's see - over the last three decades more Blacks and Hispanics are enrolled in college and more are getting bachelor's degrees too, so I guess there's nothing to worry about on that front as well. See how convenient it can be to look simply at raw numbers. 
 
I would love for them to have tackled the report put out by the University of California which showed that the predictive validity of HS GPA is had a drastic fall-off in the late 90s while the predictive validity of the SAT held steady. Now it's odd, don't you think, that boy's outperform girls in the SAT but girls outperform boys in HS grades. I wonder if it has anything to do with new instructional mandates and process, you know, like giving points on Math tests for proper spelling.