Slashback: Passports, Microscopes, IQ Points

Slashback tonight with updates and clarifications on recent Slashdot stories (and story arcs), including a downright Operatic end to Jon S. von Tetzchner's cross-oceanic attempt (or was that just in fun?), the status of post-death email privacy, minimizing the dangers of RFID passports, and more - read on for the details.

Actually, it's taking tests that reduces IQ. The guys at Mind Hacks have dissected the widely reported story that 'email destroys the mind faster than marijuana' [Posted on Slashdot a few days ago -- T.] and found that it is more spin than science. The results show simply that people do worse at IQ tests when distracted, although Hewlett-Packard are not releasing details of the experiment, so others cannot even evaluate if the research is sound. The use of psychobabble for marketing marches on.

One day this will all be commemorated as ... an opera. GreyPoopon writes "It looks like Jon's attempt at swimming the Atlantic has ended in early failure. Taking the blame once again is is PR Manager, Eskil Sivertsen. The raft he was using was somehow punctured this morning, and Jon had to abondon his trek to perform a heroic rescue. Perhaps someone should take on the task of sending our downtrodden adventurer a cup of Mom's hot chocolate."

PCP theorem simplified, still way over my head. Stridar writes "Sanjeev Arora's proof of the PCP theorem was a great acheivement. This theorem, a reduction of NP to PCP, allowed for many striking results on the difficulty of finding approximate solutions to NP-Hard problems. However, his original proof is long and technical, focusing on the arithmetization of booelan formulas. It has long been an open problem to simplify this result. Now Irit Dinur , a mathematician at the Hebrew University, has given a purely combinatorial proof of the PCP theorem, in her exciting paper "The PCP Theorem by Gap Amplification" ."

I think several other things end at death, too. microbee writes "The Register reports that Yahoo has complied with a court order to give a dead soldier's email account to his parents. It's not clear to me from the news whether they got direct access to the actual mail box, or just hard copy of those emails. If the former, it's a bit funny to read "the family complain they have only got emails received by Justin, not those he wrote." People have to wonder whether their privacy ends at death."

Haven't they ever seen The Killing Fields? valdean writes "Following up on past Slashdot stories, Wired News reports that the State Department is now considering adding a password to the new RFID passports, in response to 'criticism from computer security professionals and civil libertarians.' According to the article, 'The data... would be locked and unavailable to any reader that doesn't know a secret key or password to unlock the data. To obtain the key, a passport officer would need to physically scan the machine-readable text that's printed on the passport page beneath the photo... The reader would then hash the data to create a unique key that could be used to authenticate the reader and unlock the data on the RFID chip.'"

Anything with LEDs in it makes me happy. HunterD writes "Apparently a company called DigitalBlue purchased the rights to the Intel Play series, which included the Intel QX3 microscope. Well, DigitalBlue has released an upgrade called the QX5 that features an Ultrabright LED, a better camera, and a number of other upgrades."

Comments

Re:Limited value in IQ tests.

[Backspin]

Actually, a person with an IQ of 130 has a percentile rank of 96.96, i.e. in the top 3%

Huh? Wouldn't a percentile rank of 96.96 put that person just outside of the top 3%? I suppose you could argue that since the next highest rank (that for 131) is 97.37, most of those 130s would in fact be in the top 3%. You didn't mention that in your post, although perhaps you thought of it. I certainly can't read minds. (if I could, I'd quit my day job!) Most is not all, but since all 130s are basically the same, it's both ambiguous and arbitrary.

However, if you come in 10th out of 99, I posit that you cannot claim to be in the top 10%.

Re:IQ

[porcupine8]

Generally, the use of the term "IQ score" implies a standard score, with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 or 16. Basically all major ability and achievement tests give standard scores.

All psychological assessments are not IQ tests or ability tests. Anything that is subject-based is likely an achievement test, not an ability test. I can't find anything remotely similar to "myers child ratio" or any ability tests involving myers and davis (both with several alternate spellings of myers) in the Mental Measurements Yearbook, so honestly I would have serious doubts about the use of those tests.

I agree about the origins of IQ tests. The first ones were horribly biased and very much knowledge-based. Luckily, there's been a century of solid research since then, I think they may have managed to improve them a bit in that time.

You do make a good point that different IQ tests do measure slightly different things. Most are heavily weighted on a factor known as g, a "general factor of intelligence," but they do have other weightings. Traditional IQ tests tend to be rather verbally weighted, whereas newer nonverbal ones, of course, aren't. So if you're more or less of a verbal person you may score differently on those different types.