Kottke links to a New York Times piece that suggests that people adopted by higher income families will end up with a higher IQ.
If IQ indicates intelligence, as the name suggests, then this is interesting as part of the nature vs nurture debate.
On the other hand, if IQ tests are fundamentally flawed and merely represent education, then all this result says is that rich people tend to get a better education.
What is more likely? That IQ tests are accurate but that the real world is messed up or that, according to Occams Razor, nature is governed by simple laws but there is a flaw in the measurement?
One of the things that is absolutely obvious about an IQ test, is that it doesn't really test intelligence because it asks all sorts of questions that require such things as a large vocabulary in the language of the test.
So how could this be? Clearly there are all sorts of aspects of IQ tests that test pure logic etc., these seem fairly objective tests.
The problem is that if the tests included are solely logic tests, then they would be perceived to have a scientific bias. To suggest that only scientific ability is a measure of intelligence, would have half of acedemia in uproar, so IQ tests put in things to test areas represented by other disciplines such as languages and the arts.
IQ tests try to balance different academic skills as a political compromise rather than a comprehensive measure.
To measure skills in qualitative disciplines, such as the arts, by quantitative measures is like saying that a painter and decorator is better than Vermeer because he can cover a larger area, more quickly.
The point is that a comprehensive IQ test is nowhere near there yet, and people wouldn't be happy with a SQ or Science Quotient.
So, in the mean time, you have people getting all embarassed because ethnic minorities sometimes get lower scores in IQ tests. Instead of saying 'OF COURSE THEY FUCKING WELL DO' because 1. ethnic minorities often did not have the same rights as the majority and as a result are poorer on average, 2. poorer people tend to get a worse education and have to start work earlier in life.
Perhaps people who really believe in IQ tests, like the subset of people that on getting a high score, decide to join the club of mental mediocrity - MENSA, probably aren't particularly intelligent.
The part of an IQ test that tests logic and spacial awareness is a pretty good test for an aeronautical engineer, but IQ tests do not measure IQ. QED.
Old farts like myself, who were tinkering with the Internet in the early 90s will remember that there was a sudden surge in interest in the Internet a year or so before the web.
The tendency is to think that the Web was the prime reason for the increased adoption of the Internet, but in fact it is more likely that the Web was actually the result of an evolutionary niche being opened up by the spread of the Internet.
Once the Web was born, of course, it did help fuel the growth of the Internet, but like almost any other 'ecosystem' from the autocatalytic reactions in a single cell organism, to the money flow in an industrial economy, it was based upon a circular feedback loop, making it difficult to separate the chicken from the egg.
The are two other very important examples of cause and effect which were not what they seemed: oil and coal.
It would seem plausible to assume that the industrial revolution created engines which needed coal, which was eventually replaced by the more transportable oil.
In fact the demand for coal was stimulated by a decline in the available wood during the mini ice age in the 17th and 18th centuries. Steam engines, often running on wood fires, were developed to pump water out of coal mines. Later, a positive feedback loop would mean that more coal could mean more steam engines.
Similarly, the demand for oil was created by a demand for lamp oil to light the factories of the industrial revolution, long before it was used to transport the workers and the goods they produced, creating a bigger marketplace and demand.
The lesson from this, is perhaps that:
1. looking for cause and effect in a strictly linear fashion is nonsense.
2. business plans that are looking to change the world by attracting a significant slice of an existing market or 'ecosystem' would be better off focusing on how to step up between small to large marketplaces.
If you like this is similar to the vogueish marketing books of the last dotcom boom, like Crossing the Chasm or Inside the Tornado. The difference being that there is not one tornado but a series of ever increasing ones, with fractal like self similarity. The inverse pattern of turbulent air flow.
Perhaps the skill (or luck) of the entrepreneur is to find the seemingly trivial niche (like selling crude oil instead of Sperm Whale fat for lighting) that could interconnect all the way to the top.
The people that did this in the last boom were not Napster or Webvan, but people like Blogger or Ebay. And before you say, oh but Blogger never became a huge company, consider this:
The founders made more than the founders of some billion dollar companies, and they got to change the world at the same time.
Even if Webvan had succeeded, it was kind of boring and complicated and difficult to setup in your garage.
Scientists Say They've Found a Code Beyond Genetics in DNA - New York Times
Daniel Kottke.
Not Leo.
If He's So Smart...Steve Jobs, Apple, and the Limits of Innovation
... sound of sporadic popping of blood vessels from Redstate.com readers, accompanied by light banjo music:
Summary of the argument against global warming from Redstate.com
Its not true.
Oh shit, it is true - then it has absolutely nothing to do with my fat-ass pickup truck. Paws off.
Like the nice guy who used to work for Exxon explained, there is no link between tobacco and global warming.
CO2 is not the problem because thats too complicated and requires math. Its gotten hotter because someone turned up the volume on the sun control.
Oh shit - 99% of scientists say they have evidence that my fat-ass pickup is partly to blame.
Scientists are all commies, so their views are political and therefore not scientific.
We should only take science advice from people who sell fat-ass pickups becuase they are not commies and are therefore unbiased.
Bush looks like the guy who sold me my pickup, I'll vote for him, not some nancy, preppy, Ivy League, cheerleader from a posh family.
Al Gore is only pretending he grew up on a farm - people who talk about science are all city liberals who drive girls cars. Only real men drive SUVs and pickups, not soccer mums.
I'd have to be six feet under water with $5 a gallon gas before I'd believe this crock.
etc. etc.
Rooting around a nutty Christian website, which debunks UFO chasers with stuff that makes the maddest of the tin foil hat people look positively sane:
Intelligent Life in Outer Space?
"That's right, one of the reasons that God made the Moon, solar system and stars was to provide a way for us to distinguish the passage of time (days, months and years) and predict the coming of seasons. Without these heavenly bodies, the job of keeping time and navigation would have been far more difficult."
So the reason for creating 99.9999999999999..99% percent of everything was so that the 0.0000000000000...001% have a wristwatch.
Thats the best argument for a blind watchmaker I've ever heard.
An idea that my good friend Simon Perry had a while ago - provide inline links to specific points in video and you create the video web.
Without time based web links into binary files, video would be like a web where text links were only to entire websites, not individual pages- useless.
Official Google Video Blog: New Feature: Link within a Video
Pity the poor guy that has this on his business card.
Sort of like the Empire State building meets Japan, in a very bad way.
link »
tags: [weird]
Probably the single biggest asset that Friendster has now:
Metropolis Magazine reviews Google's horrid new offices.
It takes the 'working here is so much fun we're so playful' spin to its most simplistic architectural representation - bright colors and toys.
All of these, of course, are a thin veneer over the reality - a strip lit, cubicle ridden, hell hole, like a parody of The Office.
Google's products are still failry sophisticated - I hope the office environment doesn't rub off.
Back from vacation and noticed that the People Aggregator is already up.
Congrats to Marc and everyone involved! Wishing you every well deserved success.
Focus on 'Reach', use Rank anomalies, and the 'geek factor' for audience, to lower the reach figures to get the real picture for some sites.
Many 'web 2.0' startups are likely to have a bunch of their own employees who have the Alexa bar installed and are feverish stats obsessives. For moderate ranked sites this can skew Alexa since their own traffic is a significant percentage of the overall number of Alexa users who hit the site. Fortunatley, you can actually use this to help correct the stats.
Here are some rules of thumb I use to get better stats:
1. Ignore Page views and Rank, for sites that are not in the top 5,000.
2. Always monitor your own site, from a machine that does not have Alexa istalled then look at your site's reach vs another's reach and then your sites rank vs another's rank. If there is a marked difference in the spread between these 2 sets of figures such that rank looks relatively better than reach for the competitor site, then they probably boost their own Alexa figures. Depending on the spread you can actually use this to your advantage to calculate the appropriate reduction in their reach numbers.
3. Weigh in the 'geek factor'. A site with 1000 geek marketing types will likely have a higher Alexa than 100,000 teens. Look at inbound links to the sites and try and figure out the audience and weight appropriately.
Ironic - you can now check your previous dependencies on Independence Day.
A good time to check and see if your last name shows in the Origins Database, if you have Irish or British ancestors. The site will be free for a day and a half over the holiday.
OriginsNetwork.com - 4th July Independence Day Offer