Re: MIT Engineers
Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2012 12:53 pm
$3K to rebuild a transmission? I got mine done for $800 a few years ago, never had a problem with it since. Rear wheel drive, though...
Yes in the 1600s - 1700s, people of wealth would walk around with leather made bags tied to their asses so they could poop anytime they needed. Back in those days, there was no such thing as fiber supplements and such so the urge could strike at any time. So they could go about their entire day / night of socializing with other people of wealth and not have to worry about interruptions. That is how business got done back in the day. I guess they were the first to use the ABC method of business. When they would return home in the evening, they would have servants assist them in cleaning up themselves and cleaning the bags for future use. Further proof is provided by paintings from that era. If you notice, usually the men didn't wear very tight fitting pants to allow some extra room in the ass area. Also, most of the painting have men standing in the majority of them as well, sitting would provide some discomfort if you had used said butt bag. However, the great stomach flu of 1756 but an end to the butt bag era.Hizzy III wrote:Forget that. Let's go back to this sutble yet intriguing phrase that I pulled from about midways through the exchange:
right wind but bag
What exactly is a (and I'm assuming the intended spelling) right wing butt bag? Matter of fact, what is a butt bag? Is that like a diaper?
You Caucasians will have to enlighten me on such smack talk.
Bklyn wrote:I can almost always tell the ethnicity of the author depending on their position...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-0 ... n-hsu.html
Expand Prof. Hsu makes several critical errors in his op-ed.
1. The primary issue is whether discrimination exists, not whether "it is a common belief among Asian-American families" that there is discrimination.
2. Hsu claims that SAT "statistics seem to support the claim of bias across most of
elite higher education", but his source of data, the Campus Life and Learning (CLL) study at Duke University, refutes any such glib appeals to test scores. The CLL project has published about 20 statistical regressions measuring various aspects of academic performance at Duke (such GPA during the 8 semesters of college, graduation rates, honors at graduation, etc) and in all these statistical analyses, whenever high school academic credentials are taken into account, Asian students are found to underperform relative to whites. The studies include a number of direct and indirect controls for choice of major, socioeconomic background and other factors, so these robust findings cannot be easily attributed to Asians choosing harder subjects. Indeed, one of the findings of the study cited by Hsu is that SAT scores and other academic credentials, not race, are the key to students' choices of major.
3. Underperformance of (East) Asian-Americans relative to credentials is seen not only in the many Duke CLL studies, but in essentially every other post-admission context for which studies or public data are available in the past 15-20 years, such as the Espenshade-Radford-Chung analysis of class rank at selective colleges, or Jesse Rothstein's study of grades in the UC system. This underperformance is, again, the opposite of the signal that would be expected if discrimination took place, and it is most clearly visible in the same sorts of objective national exam metrics after college, on which Asians outperformed whites in high school. For example, statistically, Asians underperform on the LSAT relative to the verbal SAT; underperform their LSAT scores in law school grades and bar passage rates; underperform on the medical licensing exams relative to MCAT scores entering medical school; and underperform on university math competitions relative to high school contests. These are individual-level effects that are often visible in easily gathered population level numbers, such as Harvard having a much smaller fraction of E.Asians among its recent valedictorians (about 1 in 10) than the E.Asian fraction of super-qualified students who won the top accolades in high school (about 1 in 2, or higher, as hinted at in Professor Hsu's request for data on applicants with perfect SAT scores). If discrimination were taking place one would expect to see Asians dominating the college-level academic metrics even more so than in high school, but the opposite occurs. The same is true for Princeton and the other Ivies for which data is available.
4. A disclosure of detailed admissions data would certainly be interesting, but low-resolution data can be criticized as inconclusive, while high-resolution data such as a spreadsheet listing all applicants' credentials (SAT, GPA, data on high school, etc) and admission results, can be parsed to show discrimination whether or not it actually exists. The reason is that there are many race-neutral admission factors that on average disadvantage Asians, and a statistical study (such as the much publicized regression studies performed by Thomas Espenshade) would falsely detect them as an "Asian SAT penalty" even if the admission procedure were race-blind. Examples include: relatively higher Asian clustering by high school, by major, by geography and by extracurricular activities; colleges' use of admission metrics that compare applicants to others within those clusters, such as class rank; different weighting of verbal and math SAT; and the consideration given to athletics (and some types of athletics more than others) in admission.
5. Hsu disregards direct statistical evidence against discrimination, such as the positive Asian effects calculated in Espenshade's study at the lower income levels, and the statistical studies performed by the Center For Equal Opportunity on data from elite public universities (Berkeley and Michigan before the ballot initiatives, UVA, Wisconsin recently) showing either no effect or a slight advantage for Asians. Similarly, Daniel Golden has for years mis-stated the U Michigan study results, which tend to exonerate rather than indict the school of charges that it discriminates against Asians. The Berkeley, UVA and Wisconsin studies found positive admission effects from being Asian but this interesting fact was not reported anywhere.
6. Hsu, like Daniel Golden before him, incorrectly interprets a difference in average SAT scores for enrolled whites and Asians at a given university (in this case, Duke) as an indication of discrimination in admission. A complete analysis for Duke would require a separate long comment, but as above there are race-neutral factors that operate, such as NCAA Div I athletic admission, a 15 percent North Carolina quota, and separate SAT-intensive admission to Duke's engineering school, that would raise the Asian SAT average well above that of whites in the student population even if both groups are treated equally in admission.
Because math and accountancy are two different things...eCat wrote:you want racial bias? Asians are great at math but everyone wants a jew as their accountant.