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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Quick Hits

Quick Hits

by John Cole|  September 23, 200510:24 am| 11 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing

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Projetc Nothing has an on the ground report from the traffic jam in Houston. With pictures.

Jeremy Dibbell has a post on the impact slowing down has on fuel efficiency.

Andrew Sullivan and Armando at dKos have a cage match.

The Carpetbagger has more on Abramoff/DeLay/Rove.

And don;t forget to check out the Dawn Patrol, a round-up of links about Iraq, Afghanistan, and Politics.

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11Comments

  1. 1.

    TallDave

    September 23, 2005 at 10:32 am

    If you like Greyhawk’s Dawn Patrol, you might also enjoy Bill Roggio’s flash presentation today. Interesting stuff.

  2. 2.

    Steve

    September 23, 2005 at 11:12 am

    Sullivan was right in his disagreement with Armando, but his notion that “let’s use this as a test of whether the lefty blogosphere can self-correct!” is overflowing with pompous self-importance, even for Sullivan. Yes, even though 100 dkos commenters had already called Armando out on his misstatement, the world must stop because Andrew Sullivan has cried foul.

  3. 3.

    John Cole

    September 23, 2005 at 11:19 am

    Anyone want to run-down the corrections I am still waiting for from Sullivan? They number in the dozens, I bet.

  4. 4.

    Dave Ruddell

    September 23, 2005 at 11:39 am

    What’s funny though is that Armando is actively refusing to admit he’s in the wrong. It’s one thing to just ignore the topic, but to insist that you’re right in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, well that’s just [INSERT NAME OF YOUR MOST HATED POLITICAL FIGURE HERE]-esque.

  5. 5.

    Steve

    September 23, 2005 at 12:19 pm

    But Sullivan gets it wrong when he says Armando is stupid, which he definitely is not. He is just world-class stubborn.

  6. 6.

    Retief

    September 23, 2005 at 12:40 pm

    Sullivan is the one who is wrong. Larry is smoking crack if he thinks that a few point difference in Standard Deviation is more important than a 100 point the difference in means. I’m looking at the GRE data. On the quantitative scores, the Male mean was 651 and SD was 138. The female mean was 557 and SD was 149. Please note, 149 is greater than 138. The man is repeating rightwing dogma, not based in realityland, when he spouts this Standard Deviation line. He is also demonstating basic innumeracy when he claims that the 11 point difference in SD has more impact on the top tail than a 94 point difference in means even if the direction of the SD gap were reversed the way he claims. So yes, his abuse of the statistical concept of standard deviation to cloak his reformating of the hoary “men are just smarter” foolishness in pseudoscientific legitimacy is nonsensical. Of course none of the slicing of scores will make much difference as long as the disparity in number of boys and of girls taking the test and aiming at math & science remains. Any fair observer will have to note that Larry Summers address conveniently concentrated on factors beyond the control of University Presidents in his explanations.

  7. 7.

    Retief

    September 23, 2005 at 1:06 pm

    Dawn Patrol is not terrible. But people who get their Afghanistan news there must have been puzzled by the US General defending US airstrikes against criticism from the President of Afghanistan today, as they never got to hear about how Karzai Wants End to U.S.-Led Operations three days ago. Like I said, I don’t want to jump down Dawn Patrol’s throat, but this seems a little more newsworthy that the latest outrageuous translation from outrageous translation specialists, MEMRI.

  8. 8.

    Dave Ruddell

    September 23, 2005 at 1:49 pm

    You’re using the quantutative portion of the GRE as a surrogate for mathematical ability in the general population? You do realize that the GRE is only taken by those going to grad school, don’t you? Whichis to say people who are already at the far end of one of the tails

    Or how about this? The SAT math scores for females are higher every year than for males. Given that far more people take the SAT than the GRE, clearly it’s a better indicator, no? Therefore, women are clearly better than men at math, right?

    Of course, that’s BS as well. Only college-bound students take the SAT, so you’re still not capturing the general population.

  9. 9.

    Dave Ruddell

    September 23, 2005 at 1:59 pm

    Alright, I just found a different link here (which is actually from the College Board) that has men ahead of women on the SAT math in all years reported. Nevertheless, this result still does not invalidate Summers’ remarks, since the SAT still is only capturing the top end of the distribution.

  10. 10.

    Retief

    September 23, 2005 at 5:40 pm

    The very tippy top of the tail is all Summers, or anybody who is talking about the composition of tenured professors at top universities, cares about. Why does he assume the means are the same? How could he abstract the supposed standard deviations of the males and females knowing only that his guess based on a bunch of estimates that were “all over the map” was that two thirds of the top 5% of 12th graders were male without making a bunch of baseless assumptions? When you start a sentence with “Whatever the difference in means…” don’t expect anybody familiar with staistics to take the rest of what you say seriously. But anyway, the people at the .01% level that Summers says is required to win a to 25 university job are aberations. They’re freaks, and boatloads of data about the 99.99% of people within four standard deviations of the mean tells us very little about them. Summers can’t tell us just what it is that we could measure that determines ability to win tenure at a top university, and yet he want’s to tell us that he’s pretty sure males have 20% greater variablity in that mysterious characteristic than females do?

  11. 11.

    TallDave

    September 26, 2005 at 2:45 pm

    The whole Summers thing is so stupid. No one is discussing the fact that more women go to college than men.

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