Teeth
My knitting blog is now located at the Needle Exchange!
All Dogs Go To Heaven
I don’t usually go for these types of meme comedy things, but this is worth a chuckle.
Variability of Males vs. Females
So I was thinking about that common argument that there are more men in the top and bottom 1% of academic tests because men are more variable. Is it the nature of the genders, or the nature of the test? When the test was initially designed, I’d imagine that they made a conscious effort to maximize the variation in scores so they could tell the difference between the good kids and the great kids. If they tested this on boys and not girls (either because the test was developed in a boys’ school or the style of question was introduced when boys did most of the schoolin’), they would have maximized the variance for boys but perhaps not girls (if girls do indeed think differently). If variance were maximized for girls, would the variance for boys decrease?
Here’s a graph to show what I mean:
I am too lazy to put labels on the graphs, but you know what I mean. QED.
Issues??
What? You mean the American elections should actually involve a discussion of policy? Now I’ve heard everything.
YES!
This expresses all my feelings about these absurd and unfunny commercials. Who cares about Jerry Seinfeld anymore? Who cares about that stupid discount shoe membership? Geez.
More Gender Bias!
Judges insanity decisions show same sex bias
An interesting abstract from the latest Nordic Journal of Psychiatry: when given otherwise identical case reports of murderers marked either male or female, psychiatrists and psychology students were more likely to declare women ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’. In contrast, judges showed an interesting same sex bias, in that they were more likely to declare a person of the same sex ‘legally insane’ than a perpetrator of the opposite sex.
It is always so amazing to read about findings like this every single day and then hear from so many male scientists with their head in the sand saying that there is no longer any gender discrimination in the workplace / academia. It’s sickening.