Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: intelligence

  • Peril of Good Intentions

    I ran across a friend’s Facebook post about parenting and related a description of a college psychology professor’s eugenics lecture. The reply was that eliminating the genes of less intelligent people seems like it could help improve society. This seeming promise is why it has been tried many times. Before the Holocaust shifted to genocide, it…

  • IE and IQ

    A friend posted the Internet Explorer users ‘have below-average IQ’ story on Google+. On the one hand, I love the idea of bashing IE users as incapable computer users who ought to get off the Internet. But then my Psychology background screams at this study as generally worthless. The lack of a statistical analysis ought to…

  • The Ares Imperative

    A friend of mine, Steve Ekstrom, is the writer of this comic which I enjoyed for the this first 8 pages. I’m looking forward to the next installments. Check out The Ares Imperative! (And vote for it if you like it. The winner gets published by DC Comics.) Interview: Synopsis: It’s the early 21st Century…

  • The LMS is So Web 1.5

    The claims Blackboard’s Learn 9 provides a Web 2.0 experience has bothered me for a while now. First, it was the drag-n-drop. While cool, that isn’t Web 2.0 in my opinion. A little more on track is the claim: The all-new Web 2.0 experience in Release 9 makes it easy to meaningfully combine information from…

  • Causal Stupidity

    Image via Wikipedia I remember as a kid, my parents restricting television and video game use because they would both make me stupid and violent. They worked too hard, so I had plenty unsupervised time to violate the rules. Plus no force would make me do homework. The past half decade has seen a resurgence…

  • Why One Should Not Connect With Egoists on Social Networks

    “Second, if you add me as a friend I assume you want me to send you emails and interact with you.” — Plaxo: the social monster? – Scobleizer Robert is the geek equivalent of Paris Hilton or Brittany Spears or Lindsey Lohan: A sad trainwreck we all thank a higher being that its not us.…

  • Humans 51,749,484,784,784 v. Computers 4

    The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: A Computer Program Wins Its First Scrabble Tournament When Deep Blue first defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, the computer program’s victory was hailed as a watershed moment for artificial intelligence, and rightfully so. But in November, another program reached a gaming milestone of its own, and no one seemed to…

  • MIT Fraternity Accused Of Robot Hazing

    The Onion made me smile tonight. MIT Fraternity Accused Of Robot Hazing | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source Several members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology chapter of the Theta Tau fraternity are in campus-police custody today following a brutal hazing incident in which one robot remains missing and two others are in…

  • MIT Fraternity Accused Of Robot Hazing

    The Onion made me smile tonight. MIT Fraternity Accused Of Robot Hazing | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source Several members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology chapter of the Theta Tau fraternity are in campus-police custody today following a brutal hazing incident in which one robot remains missing and two others are in…