Yeah, I do the same thing. One smart-ass said to me "You have a misunderstanding. It was not you who created value by buying overpriced training, it was the employees who created the value by learning the skills. If you do not want to pay by the hour for the skills, then you are not entitled to their labor." So I released him back to the market. I'm sure it was good training.
"...as soon as you trained someone, spending tens of thousands of dollars, they thought they were worth more money
Yeah, that happens all over. As soon as you promote somebody, after spending hundreds of hours of effort to get the position created, they suddenly think they're worth more money. What's up with that? And who are these "families" my minions keep whining about? Don't they understand the lifestyle we selected for them doesn't have time for pointless distractions? I've even caught some of them trying to get away with working only 40 hours a week, too or ducking phone calls in right in the middle of Saturday afternoon, because they were "taking Cisco tests" or some such exuse for their letting their lifestyle get in the way of business and me finding the remote to my dvd player. Heh... next thing you know, my delivery boy will be wanting gas money for that van he had to get to handle the bigger boxes. I figure he shouln't complain, since he doesn't have an apartment now, and those cost way more. He doesn't understand that we always expect a person in his position to care about their field enough to make sure living in a van, possibly down by the river, is part of their lifestyle.
I'm not sure how those numbers were arrived at. My impression was that the WAIS has a hard ceiling of 160 (4 sigma), and that the upper range of the test (>130) was almost universally considered an underestimate, severely limited by ceiling effects. OTOH, at 14 very little age adjustment needs to be applied to most subtests since the development curve turns the corner at around 11 - 12 and adult performance is reached by age 16 on the overall IQ score. So if you got a perfect raw score, 5 SD is pretty much a guess, 4+ SD is all you can really say.
The test at 24 is more puzzling, since I don't believe the WAIS can give a deviation IQ of over 160, and I'm not sure of the scaling of raw scores on the WAIS. The same question applies to the SB at 26, perhaps this was some sort of raw score, since to my knowledge, the adult SB has always had a 4 SD (max IQ 164 until the recent change to a 15-pt. SD) hard ceiling, while for children taking the form L/M there is an extended approximation table (drawn up by a Mr. Pinneau) which can give higher scores. This is how Marylyn vos Savant got her world record score - she was 8 and got a near-perfect score on the highest levels of the adult SB. On the latest version (out too recently for a CrankyOldBastard to have taken it as a child) of the SB5 there is also an EXIQ table for children, but the latest norming is very tough and the table is rarely needed.
Anyway, you might want to join some of the high IQ clubs out there. The Mega Society (IQ 176 / 1 in 1,000,000 cutoff, which is now once again under the control of the really cranky old bastard, Kevin (the Unspeakable) Langdon (aka Melvin in certain satires)) still accepts the very tough Titan test, which you might find fun. Prometheus Society's (4 SD) mail list is also fairly under the spell of KL and his coterie, and don't even think about the Triple Nine Society unless you really like bickering and reactionary politics. (There are some good people there, too, of course - it is the biggest of the ultra high-IQ societies.) Ultranet (4 SD) is relatively good, with some real geniuses among the regular list contributors. It's sponsored by KL's longtime foes Gina LoSasso and Chris Langan. (Langan's TOE, the CTMU is very rarely mentioned, so don't let it scare you off.)
I saw things the same way here. The exit polls were the real smoking gun.
the probability that that perfectly random exit samples would be off by as much as they were in the three critical states of Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania is less than one to 152 million (1/152,209,887). The probability that non-random exit samples would be simultaneously in error in all three states at once is about one to 468 thousand (1/467,907), or in lay terms: impossible. [Ron Baiman The United States of Ukraine?: Exit Polls Leave Little Doubt that in a Free and Fair Election John Kerry Would Have Won both the Electoral College and the Popular Vote]
Bev Harris has nothing to do with the issue; bringing up the petty squabbles within the anti-black-box-voting movement doesn't help achieve the goals of the movement. Not reporting stories like this just because some people are on the outs with Bev Harris would just give the corrupt elections officials and vendors a free pass to do as they please.
I read your link and most of the links on that page, and I'm not impressed. Apparently some people find Bev Harris abrasive and a little paranoid, and are up in arms and throwing all kinds of nebulous and unsubstantiated allegations around. Maybe she is as bad as some people say, but it looks to me like an internecine squabble, nothing to do with the real issues.
There is no generally accepted definition of genius, and it certainly isn't a reflection of IQ alone, but rather of a creative capacity that is in some sense at the level of the best the human race has to offer. The odds of genius rise with IQ, and out around 160 (4 SD) in my experience it becomes common. But there are plenty of geniuses out there who score in the 130s and 140s. IQ isn't all that accurate or precise, particularly for high scores. It only measures a person's ability to solve contrived and artificial rather than natural and ill-defined problems, and it does not test the ability to delineate new problems or to frame old problems in a new way.
As far as fixing communications gear goes, yes, in my experience, the brighter the tech, the more problems he'll find. And the more problems he finds, and the more thouroughly he fixes them, the worse the quality ranking he'll get on "six sigma" bullshit metrics that big telcom companies use. IQ is better than that, but it still filters out most real intelligence in real complex and fluid situations with competing goals and measures of value.
Gardner is not a psychometrician. Sternberg among others proposed the concept of multiple intelligences before Gardner and did so in a much more precise and quantitative way than Gardners popular speculations. Further, Sternberg found the factor analytic structure of the correlations between different people's performances on human tasks in general is hierarchical and tree-like, and most subfactors are g-loaded to a significant degree. The intelligences aren't entirely distinct, and become less distinct the finer the level of the heierarchy at which they are analyzed.
Actually I have monitored the three- to five- sigma IQ societies for some time, and their conversations are usually less intelligent than the norm here in Slashdot. (Sad, I know.) Maybe your standards of genius are just unrealistic?
To expand on your point, there are four types of measurement scale, each of which only supports the arithmetic operations of its own type and those of the more restricted types. They are, from most restricted to most general, with permissible operations:
Nominal Measurement Scale [e.g. phone numbers]- Counting Ordinal Measurement Scale [e.g. serial numbers, class rank]- Greater than or less than operations. Interval Measurement Scale [e.g.Fahrenheit, Celsius - scale divisions of equal quantity]- Addition and subtraction of scale values. Ratio Measurement Scale [e.g. length, mass, Kelvin - interval scale with a unique, meaningful zero point]- Multiplication and division of scale values.
You have to get a certain amount of charge on the gate before it reaches the requred voltage, and the gate has a certain capacitance, so lowering the supply voltage increases the time to switch, yes? The capacitance is parasitic, but I think the GP has it exactly right.
While the impedence does not change much with voltage within the operating range of the device, the voltage directly affects how fast the chip can be clocked and the amount of heat it produces, both of which substantially affect the impedence. The rest of your post is a bit confusing. There is no such thing as a digital transistor, or digital electronics for that matter. There is no such thing as a "threshold voltage" - there are three voltage ranges in a given semiconductor process intended for digitally-encoded signals- low, high and indeterminate. The overall voltage transfer function of a "digital" device, while seldom linear for over much of a range, is smooth and monotonic and can be (mis)used for non-digitally encoded analog signals.
"I'm a conservative and don't think that there should be any dissent on racial equality of abilities."
The evidence is against you here. Clearly Asians have a distinct disadvantage when it comes to the physical requirements of professional basketball, and the appearance of a Yao Ming does not refute the difference in the means of the height distributions and the resulting extreme disparity in the number of Asians as compared with Blacks who are three or more standard deviations out from the overall population mean height.
Just as an example, say one minority population (e.g. Blacks) has a wider spread of heights and a greater mean heigh than the overall population, so that someone two SD out on their disribution is at the third SD for the general population , and another minority population (e.g. Asians) has a tighter distribution and a slightly lower mean height than the overall population, so that a member of this population at the fourth SD in height is at the third SD of height for the overall population. Then the relative proportion of people in the first group that have the height requred to play pro basketball will be, IIRC, around 1 in 50 compared to 1 in 30,000 in the second group. So the expected proportion of the first to the second group among pro basketball players will be 600 to 1, assuming that the two minorities are of equal numbers in the overall population. There is no discrimination going on, yet modest differences in groups lead to extreme disproportions out in the tails.
This happens with intellectual differences between groups, too. There is no doubt given the massive amount of research that groups differ substantially, measurably and repeatably in their ability to do any cognitively loaded test and the amount of the disparity between groups depends directly and positively on the degree of cognitive loading of the test. Both race and sex are predictors of performance on cognitive tests: men do better on mathematical and most spatial tasks, women on verbal and certain types of visual tasks. (This difference seems to show up at puberty and to be linked to testosterone.) The difference is fairly mild, but men also have a wider distrbution of abilities, so that there are far more men at the top and bottom of the distribution than women. Asians do better than Whites at mathematical/spatial reasoning by about half a standard deviation, Northern- and Eastern- European-descended Jews do better than other European-descended people on all major cognitive measures by about 1 - 2 SDs, American Latinos do worse than Whites on all major cognitive factors by about half of an SD, and American Blacks trail Whites by about a SD. Herenstein and Murray's book The Bell Curve is the most convenient place to get references (hundreds of 'em!) to studies demonstrating these approximate figures. Many have attempted to refute the arguments of The Bell Curve, but the facts of group differences have never really been in dispute, only the causes. Fine sentiments such as reverence for the principles of legal equality and the innate worth of people will not by themselves change the facts.
At the tails of the distributions there is very little overlap between the abilities of certain groups. Look at the asians just coming out of college - their mean score was 674 on the GRE quantitative vs. 483 for the same-age blacks - the 25th percentile cutoff for the asians is 610, while the 75th percentile score for the blacks in that age group is 580. If you were to compare the quantitative scores of young male asian with older black females you would find virtually no overlap in mathematical abilities at all. [2002-3 p.48, 51. http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/gre_factors _02-03.pdf%5D
No viewpoint supported by the overwhelming preponderance of the factual evidence should be suppressed in favor of a fond wish that is refuted by the evidence.
Good CEOs are very rare. But they are still only the alpgha male apes of the band, needed only because people can't get beyond their apeish insticts and need a "leader" to take credit because their minds aren't capable of remembering more than a few names at a time, certainly not the hundreds of people who did all the real work, whose creativity actually created all the value of the company. There are great men, certainly - but great CEOs? Don't encourage the bureaucratic and dominating impulses of the masses by glorifying CEOs - mostly they get paid so much just because they take so much.
There once was a union maid, she never was afraid Of goons and ginks and company finks and the deputy sheriffs who made the raid. She went to the union hall when a meeting it was called, And when the Legion boys come 'round She always stood her ground.
CHORUS: Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union. Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union 'til the day I die.
This union maid was wise to the tricks of company spies, She couldn't be fooled by a company stool, she'd always organize the guys. She always got her way when she struck for better pay. She'd show her card to the National Guard And this is what she'd say:
CHORUS
You gals who want to be free, just take a tip from me; Get you a man who's a union man and join the ladies' auxiliary. Married life ain't hard when you got a union card, A union man has a happy life when he's got a union wife.
Essentially everything is outside our light-cone, we cannot interact with it in any way, yet it's existence can be inferred from the symmetries of our locally observed physical laws.
There's no theoretical reason why the infinite improbability drive can't work, either. There is no reason to believe that the Chinese have any practical or even theoretical solution to wall-heating or plasma instabilty, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Remind me again why people should get married?
Yeah, I do the same thing. One smart-ass said to me "You have a misunderstanding. It was not you who created value by buying overpriced training, it was the employees who created the value by learning the skills. If you do not want to pay by the hour for the skills, then you are not entitled to their labor." So I released him back to the market. I'm sure it was good training.
"...as soon as you trained someone, spending tens of thousands of dollars, they thought they were worth more money
Yeah, that happens all over. As soon as you promote somebody, after spending hundreds of hours of effort to get the position created, they suddenly think they're worth more money. What's up with that? And who are these "families" my minions keep whining about? Don't they understand the lifestyle we selected for them doesn't have time for pointless distractions? I've even caught some of them trying to get away with working only 40 hours a week, too or ducking phone calls in right in the middle of Saturday afternoon, because they were "taking Cisco tests" or some such exuse for their letting their lifestyle get in the way of business and me finding the remote to my dvd player. Heh... next thing you know, my delivery boy will be wanting gas money for that van he had to get to handle the bigger boxes. I figure he shouln't complain, since he doesn't have an apartment now, and those cost way more. He doesn't understand that we always expect a person in his position to care about their field enough to make sure living in a van, possibly down by the river, is part of their lifestyle.
they paid _plenty_ (as in a whole shitload)
Was that metric or Imperial?
I'm not sure how those numbers were arrived at. My impression was that the WAIS has a hard ceiling of 160 (4 sigma), and that the upper range of the test (>130) was almost universally considered an underestimate, severely limited by ceiling effects. OTOH, at 14 very little age adjustment needs to be applied to most subtests since the development curve turns the corner at around 11 - 12 and adult performance is reached by age 16 on the overall IQ score. So if you got a perfect raw score, 5 SD is pretty much a guess, 4+ SD is all you can really say.
The test at 24 is more puzzling, since I don't believe the WAIS can give a deviation IQ of over 160, and I'm not sure of the scaling of raw scores on the WAIS. The same question applies to the SB at 26, perhaps this was some sort of raw score, since to my knowledge, the adult SB has always had a 4 SD (max IQ 164 until the recent change to a 15-pt. SD) hard ceiling, while for children taking the form L/M there is an extended approximation table (drawn up by a Mr. Pinneau) which can give higher scores. This is how Marylyn vos Savant got her world record score - she was 8 and got a near-perfect score on the highest levels of the adult SB. On the latest version (out too recently for a CrankyOldBastard to have taken it as a child) of the SB5 there is also an EXIQ table for children, but the latest norming is very tough and the table is rarely needed.
Anyway, you might want to join some of the high IQ clubs out there. The Mega Society (IQ 176 / 1 in 1,000,000 cutoff, which is now once again under the control of the really cranky old bastard, Kevin (the Unspeakable) Langdon (aka Melvin in certain satires)) still accepts the very tough Titan test, which you might find fun. Prometheus Society's (4 SD) mail list is also fairly under the spell of KL and his coterie, and don't even think about the Triple Nine Society unless you really like bickering and reactionary politics. (There are some good people there, too, of course - it is the biggest of the ultra high-IQ societies.) Ultranet (4 SD) is relatively good, with some real geniuses among the regular list contributors. It's sponsored by KL's longtime foes Gina LoSasso and Chris Langan. (Langan's TOE, the CTMU is very rarely mentioned, so don't let it scare you off.)
I saw things the same way here. The exit polls were the real smoking gun.
Bev Harris has nothing to do with the issue; bringing up the petty squabbles within the anti-black-box-voting movement doesn't help achieve the goals of the movement. Not reporting stories like this just because some people are on the outs with Bev Harris would just give the corrupt elections officials and vendors a free pass to do as they please.
I read your link and most of the links on that page, and I'm not impressed. Apparently some people find Bev Harris abrasive and a little paranoid, and are up in arms and throwing all kinds of nebulous and unsubstantiated allegations around. Maybe she is as bad as some people say, but it looks to me like an internecine squabble, nothing to do with the real issues.
Or maybe it's more like saying: "Belgium cedes world hegemony to the United States".
There is no generally accepted definition of genius, and it certainly isn't a reflection of IQ alone, but rather of a creative capacity that is in some sense at the level of the best the human race has to offer. The odds of genius rise with IQ, and out around 160 (4 SD) in my experience it becomes common. But there are plenty of geniuses out there who score in the 130s and 140s. IQ isn't all that accurate or precise, particularly for high scores. It only measures a person's ability to solve contrived and artificial rather than natural and ill-defined problems, and it does not test the ability to delineate new problems or to frame old problems in a new way.
As far as fixing communications gear goes, yes, in my experience, the brighter the tech, the more problems he'll find. And the more problems he finds, and the more thouroughly he fixes them, the worse the quality ranking he'll get on "six sigma" bullshit metrics that big telcom companies use. IQ is better than that, but it still filters out most real intelligence in real complex and fluid situations with competing goals and measures of value.
Gardner is not a psychometrician. Sternberg among others proposed the concept of multiple intelligences before Gardner and did so in a much more precise and quantitative way than Gardners popular speculations. Further, Sternberg found the factor analytic structure of the correlations between different people's performances on human tasks in general is hierarchical and tree-like, and most subfactors are g-loaded to a significant degree. The intelligences aren't entirely distinct, and become less distinct the finer the level of the heierarchy at which they are analyzed.
Form L/M presumably, scored on the Pinneau table at a young age. I'm curious - how old were you when you took the SB?
Actually I have monitored the three- to five- sigma IQ societies for some time, and their conversations are usually less intelligent than the norm here in Slashdot. (Sad, I know.) Maybe your standards of genius are just unrealistic?
And the Savantissimo!
Thanks for doing that- I was afraid I would have to.
To expand on your point, there are four types of measurement scale, each of which only supports the arithmetic operations of its own type and those of the more restricted types. They are, from most restricted to most general, with permissible operations:
Nominal Measurement Scale [e.g. phone numbers]- Counting
Ordinal Measurement Scale [e.g. serial numbers, class rank]- Greater than or less than operations.
Interval Measurement Scale [e.g.Fahrenheit, Celsius - scale divisions of equal quantity]- Addition and subtraction of scale values.
Ratio Measurement Scale [e.g. length, mass, Kelvin - interval scale with a unique, meaningful zero point]- Multiplication and division of scale values.
See http://web.uccs.edu/lbecker/SPSS/scalemeas.htm for more on scales of measurement.
You have to get a certain amount of charge on the gate before it reaches the requred voltage, and the gate has a certain capacitance, so lowering the supply voltage increases the time to switch, yes? The capacitance is parasitic, but I think the GP has it exactly right.
While the impedence does not change much with voltage within the operating range of the device, the voltage directly affects how fast the chip can be clocked and the amount of heat it produces, both of which substantially affect the impedence. The rest of your post is a bit confusing. There is no such thing as a digital transistor, or digital electronics for that matter. There is no such thing as a "threshold voltage" - there are three voltage ranges in a given semiconductor process intended for digitally-encoded signals- low, high and indeterminate. The overall voltage transfer function of a "digital" device, while seldom linear for over much of a range, is smooth and monotonic and can be (mis)used for non-digitally encoded analog signals.
"I'm a conservative and don't think that there should be any dissent on racial equality of abilities."
s _02-03.pdf%5D
The evidence is against you here. Clearly Asians have a distinct disadvantage when it comes to the physical requirements of professional basketball, and the appearance of a Yao Ming does not refute the difference in the means of the height distributions and the resulting extreme disparity in the number of Asians as compared with Blacks who are three or more standard deviations out from the overall population mean height.
Just as an example, say one minority population (e.g. Blacks) has a wider spread of heights and a greater mean heigh than the overall population, so that someone two SD out on their disribution is at the third SD for the general population , and another minority population (e.g. Asians) has a tighter distribution and a slightly lower mean height than the overall population, so that a member of this population at the fourth SD in height is at the third SD of height for the overall population. Then the relative proportion of people in the first group that have the height requred to play pro basketball will be, IIRC, around 1 in 50 compared to 1 in 30,000 in the second group. So the expected proportion of the first to the second group among pro basketball players will be 600 to 1, assuming that the two minorities are of equal numbers in the overall population. There is no discrimination going on, yet modest differences in groups lead to extreme disproportions out in the tails.
This happens with intellectual differences between groups, too. There is no doubt given the massive amount of research that groups differ substantially, measurably and repeatably in their ability to do any cognitively loaded test and the amount of the disparity between groups depends directly and positively on the degree of cognitive loading of the test. Both race and sex are predictors of performance on cognitive tests: men do better on mathematical and most spatial tasks, women on verbal and certain types of visual tasks. (This difference seems to show up at puberty and to be linked to testosterone.) The difference is fairly mild, but men also have a wider distrbution of abilities, so that there are far more men at the top and bottom of the distribution than women. Asians do better than Whites at mathematical/spatial reasoning by about half a standard deviation, Northern- and Eastern- European-descended Jews do better than other European-descended people on all major cognitive measures by about 1 - 2 SDs, American Latinos do worse than Whites on all major cognitive factors by about half of an SD, and American Blacks trail Whites by about a SD. Herenstein and Murray's book The Bell Curve is the most convenient place to get references (hundreds of 'em!) to studies demonstrating these approximate figures. Many have attempted to refute the arguments of The Bell Curve, but the facts of group differences have never really been in dispute, only the causes. Fine sentiments such as reverence for the principles of legal equality and the innate worth of people will not by themselves change the facts.
At the tails of the distributions there is very little overlap between the abilities of certain groups. Look at the asians just coming out of college - their mean score was 674 on the GRE quantitative vs. 483 for the same-age blacks - the 25th percentile cutoff for the asians is 610, while the 75th percentile score for the blacks in that age group is 580. If you were to compare the quantitative scores of young male asian with older black females you would find virtually no overlap in mathematical abilities at all. [2002-3 p.48, 51. http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/gre_factor
No viewpoint supported by the overwhelming preponderance of the factual evidence should be suppressed in favor of a fond wish that is refuted by the evidence.
I have to agree with Jobs - the music of Pixar's films is clearly their weakest point. Randy Newman's music gives me diabetes.
Good CEOs are very rare. But they are still only the alpgha male apes of the band, needed only because people can't get beyond their apeish insticts and need a "leader" to take credit because their minds aren't capable of remembering more than a few names at a time, certainly not the hundreds of people who did all the real work, whose creativity actually created all the value of the company. There are great men, certainly - but great CEOs? Don't encourage the bureaucratic and dominating impulses of the masses by glorifying CEOs - mostly they get paid so much just because they take so much.
1941 [to the tune of "Red Wing"]
There once was a union maid, she never was afraid
Of goons and ginks and company finks and the deputy sheriffs who made the raid.
She went to the union hall when a meeting it was called,
And when the Legion boys come 'round
She always stood her ground.
CHORUS:
Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union,
I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union.
Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union,
I'm sticking to the union 'til the day I die.
This union maid was wise to the tricks of company spies,
She couldn't be fooled by a company stool, she'd always organize the guys.
She always got her way when she struck for better pay.
She'd show her card to the National Guard
And this is what she'd say:
CHORUS
You gals who want to be free, just take a tip from me;
Get you a man who's a union man and join the ladies' auxiliary.
Married life ain't hard when you got a union card,
A union man has a happy life when he's got a union wife.
"the wine industry is pretty open to new technology"
Then why are they still mostly using corks, which have no advantages whatsoever and cause a percentage of the wine to spoil?
Essentially everything is outside our light-cone, we cannot interact with it in any way, yet it's existence can be inferred from the symmetries of our locally observed physical laws.
There's no theoretical reason why the infinite improbability drive can't work, either. There is no reason to believe that the Chinese have any practical or even theoretical solution to wall-heating or plasma instabilty, either.
As far as I'm concerned, any computer that can't be put into a contact lens is too big.
WTF are you talking about?