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| Saturday, May 14, 2005 |
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Quote du jour 
IQ = BS, cont'd
| | It's a good post, and full of tasty fudge: |
| | As long as a measure is reasonably stable, reliable, and makes sense, I think we are justified in using it to see what we can find. IQ, despite its imprecision and vagueness is all of these. Doesn't it make sense that if you can figure out little problems on a test that you might be a little smarter than someone who can't? It doesn't prove that you are smarter, of course. Nothing can ever prove that in the same way a thermometer proves something is hot. Why not use the measures that are available and track people's progress through life? We've done this with IQ and found that it is a better predictor of income than gender, parents' education, race, parents' income level, and essentially anything else you might want to think of. Whether IQ exists or not, it certainly is useful from a researcher's perspective. |
| | In case it isn't already blindingly obvious, useful is not the same as precise. Julie's post mentions that she doubts her kids would do well on a standardized IQ test. From having read her blog for a while, I think her kids are sharp. I think home-schooled children in general will be poorly measured by IQ tests. However, despite this limitation IQ has been effective in predicting what happens within populations. |
| | My problem, as I explain here, is less with IQ testing than with what IQ has come to mean. It is an extraordinarily loaded term. Most of us in the industrially developed world, I am sure, have come to believe that raw intelligence is a fixed quantity that is distributed in different amounts among individuals across every population — and that it can be measured by a test (usually comprising a series of puzzling questions). |
| | After measuring IQ for generations, and talking about people having "an IQ" for nearly as long, most of us have come to believe that an IQ test is a dipstick for measuring our most human capacity. For all the qualifiying reasons given above and elsewhere, it doesn't. At best, IQ tests measure one narrow kind of intelligence, and with remarkable inconsistency in many individual cases. (My own known IQ scores have an 80-point range.) |
| | If IQ testing were confined to the research function Bob V describes, I'd have no problem with it. But it far more commonly serves a sorting or gating function for schools and prospective employers. Worse, it supports a natural human need to insist that some people are better than other people. Worse still, it tends to deny the unique genius with which nearly all of us are born. Worst of all, it is a way that schools decide what a child is worth. |
| | I know one 6th-grader who had a score of 140+ (he got all the answers right) on the nonverbal part of an IQ test, but a verbal score of only 103. The school told the parents, "That's an average of 121.5, and our cutoff for the gifted & talented program is 130." That's how stupid they were. Then they added, "He might be a good mathemetician some day, but he won't be a writer." The kid wrote two books before he was 21 and never did a damn thing with math. |
| | One of my many IQ scores, by the way, was 103. That was in the 8th grade. It should have meant nothing. Instead it meant that the school wanted me to go to a "technical" high school to learn a "manual trade." And that my parents had to hunt down a private school. Every one of those schools administered an Otis IQ test. Because I got all the answers right on the test, the Cartaret School (long since deceased) wanted me desperately. Because I choked terribly on the same test, another school (Mount Hermon) told my parents that I was borderline retarded and at the very least I needed to go back a grade. (In fact, I had a crush on a girl who was headed to Northfield, Mount Hermon's sister school, and that was all I could think about during the test.) According to this table, my best SAT scores (nearly the worst in the now-deceased school that did take me, by the way), translate to an Otis IQ score of 119. |
| | Meaningless, of course. But highly consequential, as it tends to turn out. |
| | As for homeschooling, read what I wrote here. |
| | And kudos to Shelley for making us think, big time, about both blogrolls and the "long tail." Dave convinced me as well today, on his podcast, that the long tail is already a highly restrictive notion, a misleading distraction. The Great Flatness may in its own way be as wrong as The Bell Curve. Pointer credit to Groundhog Day. |
| | I sure there is (or will be) a Hugh MacLeod cartoon for the whole thing. |
| | By the way: I'm still not sure what to do with my antique blogroll. I do use it, some; but still... Suggestions welcome. |
Unidentified Freaking Object
| | Driving down here on Thursday night, I saw a UFO too. At first I thought it was a shooting star. It was bright, and left a streak, but seemed to be moving much slower than a shooting star — though faster than a satellite. |
| | It also appeared to be breaking up, much as a shooting star (meteor) often does. And it was at least as bright as a shooting star I'd judge the magnitude at Venus-grade (-4) or brighter. More like an Iridium flare at its brightest. It moved from North to South, and disappeared over the horizon. |
| | My guess is that I was watching a satellite burn up in the atmosphere. I've never seen that happen before, but I know it does happen every once in a while. There are thousands of the things up there, and many have already come down. |
How do you say That Sucks in French?
| | The city has voted a budget of 29 000 ¤ (!) to attack him. |
Earth to SpaceWeather.com
| | I know SpaceWeather.com has permalinks, but I have no idea how to find them. Which brings me to something I've wanted to say for awhile:::: |
| | If ever there was a site perfectly suited to the blog format (even more so, perhaps, than EdHat), it's SpaceWeather.com. So here's some modest and (trust me) very helpful advice to the SpaceWeather.com folks:: |
| | - Turn the site into a blog, where recent alerts will stay up and visible in reverse chronological fashion.
- Put permalinks on each post.
- Syndicate using RSS. It's easy. That's why it's called Really Simple Syndication.
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| | You don't have to call it a blog. You just have to borrow blog practices that have become pro forma for essentially live sites with dated material that ought to scroll off after awhile, yet maintain archives. Following this advice will improve the service enormously. |
| | Yes, you can keep up the emial and phone notifications. But since you're already committed to timely updates, why not adopt the one in use by ten million bloggers already? |
Look up
| | There will very likely be a strong aurora tonight. SpaceWeather.com said this yesterday: |
| | Sunspot 759 has just unleashed a strong M8-class solar flare. The blast produced a coronal mass ejection, which appears to be heading directly toward Earth. Stay tuned for updates. |
| | AURORA ALERT: A coronal mass ejection (CME) is heading toward Earth. It was hurled into space on May 13th (1650 UT) by an M8-class explosion near sunspot 759. Sky watchers should be alert for auroras when the cloud arrives, be alert for auroras when the cloud arrives, probably after nightfall on Saturday, May 14th. |
Nothing impersonal
Non-trivialities
| | - PubSub understands "sub-domains" — that is, blogs that exist one level (or slash "/") or more below the domain in the blog's URL.
- They break out the subdomains for large hosted sites such as LiveJournal.
- It's hard to do that for everybody because there is no consistent understanding or practice around what constitutes a "sub-domain." LiveJournal's blogs are two levels down from the LiveJournal domain (livejournal.com/users/blogname) while Corante's are one level down (corante.com/blogname). Dave Sifry's and Mary Hodder's blogs are all one level down, while Sheila Lennon's is two levels down. Hers is a newspaper-hosted blog. Other paper-hosted blogs have similar schemas. Richard Larsen of the Ventura County Star, for example, has this URL: http://blogs.venturacountystar.com/vcs/larsen/ .
- PubSub is building a database of common practices in this regard, but there are many more to discover and account for. The hackers among us should feel free to help PubSub and other services figure this kind of thing out.
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| | Along those same lines, I've been thinking of adding some new blogs at my home domain, Searls.com. (Yes, for myself, but also for others, such as Colette.) I've been thinking of making them blogname.searls.com, which would resolve (redirect? not sure) to searls.com/blogname. But I'm concerned that they'd be a lower caste of blog, at least technically. There's an old saying in the chip business: "Real men have fab." Meaning, real chip companies have fabrication plants. I'm beginning to think "Real blogs have domains." That so? Thoughts are welcome on the subject. |
discuss
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