the alpha and omega : topic:sociology

The more complicated, the better

Mahalanobis — 2007-03-22T19:41:00Z

Taken from Paul Watzlawick's book How Real is Real?[1]:

Professor Alex Bavelas, a noted expert in small-group interaction, has shown in several experiments that [misinformation] has a powerful influence on a human being's sense of reality.

In one experiment, two subjects, A and B, are seated facing a projection screen. There is a partition between them so that they cannot see each other, and they are requested not to communicate. They are then shown medical slides of healthy and sick cells and told that they must learn to recognize which is which by trial and error. In front of each of them are two buttons marked "Healthy" and "Sick," respectively, and two signal lights marked "Right" and "Wrong." Every time a slide is projected they have to press one of the buttons, whereupon one of the two signal lights flashes on.

"A" gets true feedback; that is, the lights tell him whether his guess was indeed right or wrong. His situation is one of simple discrimination, and in the course of the experiment, most "A" subjects learn to distinguish healthy from sick cells with a fair degree of correctness (i.e., about 80 percent of the time).

"B's" situation is different.
His feedback is based not on his own guesses, but on A's. Therefore it does not matter what he decides about a particular slide; he is told "right" if "A" guessed right, "wrong" if "A" guessed wrong. B does not know this; he has been led to believe there is an order, that he has to discover this order, and that he can do so by making guesses and finding out if he is right or wrong. But as he asks the "sphinx" he gets very confusing answers because he does not know that the sphinx is not talking to HIM.

In other words, there is no way in which he can discover that the answers he gets are noncontingent -- that is, have NOTHING to do with his questions -- and that therefore he is not learning anything about his guesses. So he is searching for an ORDER where there is none that HE could discover.

A and B are eventually asked to discuss what they have come to consider the rules for distinguishing between healthy and sick cells. "A"'s explanations are simple and concrete; "B"'s are of necessity subtle and complex -- after all, he had to form his hypothesis on the basis of very tenuous and contradictory hunches.

The amazing thing is that A does not simply shrug off B's explanations as unnecessarily complicated or even absurd, but is impressed by their sophisticated "brilliance." "A" tends to feel inferior and vulnerable because of the pedestrian simplicity of his assumption, and the more complicated "B"'s "delusions", the more likely they are to convince A. <>

Before they take a second, identical test (but with new slides), A and B are asked to guess who will now do better than in his first test. All B's and most A's say that B will.

[1] Watzlawick, Paul: Wie wirklich ist die Wirklichkeit? Wahn, Täuschung, Verstehen. Piper, 4. Auflage Mai 2006, S. 61 ff.

The Bell Curve Continues to Ring

HedgeFundGuy — 2005-08-28T23:46:32Z

I stumbled across a blog written by a "40-year old hedge fund manager" called Spartacus, which is kind of spooky because I'm a 40-year old hedge fund manager who occasionally blogs. Even more fun, the findings of the Bell Curve continue to resonate, especially with economists. It seems Charles Murray wrote a new defence of his original position entitled The Inequality Taboo. Not many subjects create as much name calling as this subject, which I find instructive because no one gets mad when you say something wrong like 2+2=5.

Anyway, Brad Delong's critique of Murray's latest makes mention of this note by Bowles and Gintis:

If the heritability of IQ were 0.5 and the degree of assortation, m, were 0.2 (both reasonable, if only ball park estimates) and the genetic inheritance of IQ were the only mechanism accounting for intergenerational income transmission, then the intergenerational correlation [of lifetime income] would be 0.01, or roughly two percent [of] the observed intergenerational correlation [of lifetime income between parents and children].

That's curious. The link provides some more data behind those back-of-the-envelope calculations, but it seems low from my own experience (2%?), and contrary to this study Murray did when he addressed many issues about the correlation between IQ and income in this brief article.

First Murray defines these IQ segments: Very Dull <75, Dull 75-89,
Normal 90-109, Bright 110-124, Very Bright 125+. Then he notes:

The National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY), included in its sample 5,863 subjects who shared the same household with at least one other NLSY subject as brother or sister, thereby enabling researchers to replicate The Bell Curve's analyses without worrying about the ambiguities that arise when different data bases are being compared.

To qualify for the sibling sample I use here, both siblings had to have a valid score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) administered in 1980. To make matching for background as unambiguous as possible, I further limited the sample to pairs of subjects who were full biological siblings and who lived in the same home with both biological parents through at least the younger sibling's seventh year.
...
In 1992, the median earnings for the Normals was $20,000. Their Very Bright siblings were already averaging $33,500 while their Very Dull siblings were making only $7,500. Once again, the Brights and Dulls each fell about halfway between ($26,500 and $14,000 respectively).

Thus he documents considerable correlation between IQ and income independent of SES. I find this hard to reconcile with the Bowles and Gintis estimation of 2% that DeLong finds so convincing. Of course, I remember Bowles mostly for his vigorous championing of East German productivity from state-sponsored production plans in the months prior to the wall falling in 1989.

Americans and Chinese Differ in Their World View--Literally

Mahalanobis — 2005-08-28T14:59:15Z

Scientific American: A study ($) of Chinese and American students has found that the two groups looked at scenes in photographs in distinct ways. The findings indicate that previously observed cultural differences in judgment and memory between East Asians and North Americans derive from differences in what they actually see. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that whereas North Americans tend to be more analytic when evaluating a scenario, fixating on the focal object, East Asians are generally more holistic, giving more consideration to the context. Researchers have not known, however, whether these differences originate during the encoding, retrieval, or mental comparison stages of perceptual-cognitive processing, or whether they might even be the result of reporting bias.

To try to pinpoint when these differences emerge, Richard E. Nisbett of the University of Michigan and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments in which Chinese and American students were shown a number of images, each depicting a single subject against a realistic and complex background. The participants--who wore an eye-movement tracker during the tests--were then shown pictures containing the same subjects on either old or new backgrounds and asked to judge whether they had seen the subjects before.

As the team predicted, the American students homed in on the focal subject sooner and longer than did the Chinese students, who paid more attention to the background imagery. This suggests that the Americans encoded more visual details for the focal objects than did the Chinese, which would explain why the Americans fared better when it came to determining whether they had seen a given subject before, even when it was presented against a new backdrop.

Nisbett and his collaborators posit that these differences in attention to object and context arise through socialization practices. "East Asians live in relatively complex social networks with prescribed role relations. Attention to context is, therefore, important for effective functioning," the scientists observe. "In contrast, Westerners live in less constraining social worlds that stress independence and allow them to pay less attention to context. [Source]

Proportion of fixations to object or background, across the 3-s time course of a trial. Data points are sampled every 10 ms for 01,500 ms, and every 50 ms for 1,5003,000 ms, averaging over all 36 trials. The sum of percentages at each time point may not total 100% because, at times, participants were in the process of making a saccade, thus they were in between fixations. The graph illustrates distinct eye tracking patterns of Americans and Chinese during the 3-s period. Cultural differences begin by 420 ms after onset, when an interaction of culture and region was observed, with the Chinese, but not the Americans continuing to fixate the background more than the focal object. Averaging the data from 420 to 1,100 ms, Americans were fixating focal objects at a greater proportion than backgrounds, compared with Chinese. Averaging the data from 1,100 to 3,000 ms, Chinese were fixating more often to the backgrounds and less to the objects, compared with Americans.

Anthropologists in America

HedgeFundGuy — 2005-07-28T01:58:36Z

I have long considered anthropology a crock. Instead of analyzing human biodiversity objectively in its richness, it's infused with political correctness, tendentious descriptions of mores and customs without any theory other that all humans are identical except for the current distribution of resources. For example, witness the Seville Statement on Violence where anthropologists proclaimed it scientifically proven that war, violence, and agression are not natural to humans. Kumbaya.

But maybe I'm too harsh. The nice thing about a field of study built on good intentions is that it can be very fun if you do it right. For example, Dartmouth professor Hoyt Alverson studied "the drinking culture in college." A recent article in the Dartmouth newspaper notes this deep insight into bing drinking:

Beer pong and similar drinking games are not played solely to achieve inebriation, Alverson finds, but instead serve as a competitive outlet for high-achieving students, and a structured atmosphere for peer interaction.

I hope professor Alverson was smirking when he wrote this gem:

there is an apprehension about aloneness which is ameliorated by the plans and structures of ritual drinking

Prost!

Physicists uncover Eurovision biases

Mahalanobis — 2005-05-23T03:20:10Z

Many Eurovision viewers believe there are a several cliques in the contest in which a number of countries all vote in a similar way. Using a framework of complex networks researchers from the University of Oxford analysed voting behaviour in the contest over a period from 1992 to 2003.

'As a measure of each countrys actions, we form a data series consisting of the average number of points assigned to each other entrant in the years in which they both compete. The closeness of each pair of countries can then be measured by comparing these data series using Pearsons correlation coefficient (ρ). <> The Pearson coefficients are then rescaled to produce a distance between 0 and 2 using the relationship that the rescaled distance is equal to Sqrt(2(1 − ρ)). The most closely related countries have rescaled distances close to 0, while the least correlated countries have distances close to 2. This data is then used to plot a dendrogram which provides a visual aid for identifying clusters.The figure above shows the resulting dendrogram obtained by consecutively linking the most correlated countries. For example, Greece and Cyprus have the smallest rescaled separation and so they are combined first. The next smallest rescaled distance is between Denmark and Sweden and so they form the next cluster. Once two countries A and B have been combined into a cluster, they are considered to be at the same distance from another country C, which is equal to the shorter of the distances AC and BC. This construction is then generalized up for clusters with more than two countries. The distance between any two clusters is the shortest distance between any two countries in the two clusters. Progressively more countries and clusters are combined in this way, with some countries combining with existing clusters, until all the countries are united into a single cluster. The dendrogram shows quite explicitly that the voting patterns of certain countries are highly correlated. Greece and Cyprus have a very small rescaled distance which demonstrates a very strong voting correlation. This particular finding thereby confirms a long-held belief among regular Eurovision viewers. There is a slightly less correlated cluster that involves the Nordic countries, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Finland, and somewhat surprisingly, Estonia. Many other clusters also arise: Bosnia and Turkey, Croatia and Malta, UK and Ireland (who also show a correlation with the Nordic clique), Belgium and the Netherlands and France and Portugal. The high correlations between the way in which countries assign points provides evidence in support of the theory that voting groups exist'[1].

Further analysis of voting patterns between countries allowed the researchers to identify several countries that appear to be more in tune with the rest of Europe, that is, countries that are compatible with a greater number of countries than others. Compatibility between countries was measured by analysing how often a given country exchanged points with another country. If this number exceeded that expected for a random contest, the countries were judged to be compatible. The country that was found to be compatible with the greatest number of other countries was the UK, whilst at the opposite end of the spectrum France, and to a lesser degree, Spain, were found to be the least compatible with the rest of Europe. |University of Oxford News|

via Daily Favorite

[1] How does Europe Make Its Mind Up [pdf], Daniel Fenn et al.

Internet dating analysed

Mahalanobis — 2005-02-14T04:36:18Z

When we seek a partner in everyday life, we tend to gravitate toward people who are similar to us. But when we seek a romantic liaison online, we become much less selective and feel more free to investigate different types of people people we would usually not consider. Our virtual selves are much more daring and open, thanks to anonymity. That's the word from a team of researchers at Stockholm University in Sweden... continue reading.

Red vs Blue Nothing Compared to Puritans, Cavaliers, Quakers and Scots-Irish

HedgeFundGuy — 2005-02-07T03:45:12Z

I just finished a fabulous book that I cant recommend highly enough, Albions Seed by David Hackett-Fischer. It was published in 1989, and I truly regret not having read 15 years ago. It really gives one a good feel for where America came from, four distinct groups of Englishmen. Surely it doesnt apply well to current America, where not only is English now a minor ancestry, but most people are a mix, and the community elders have long lost their monopoly on ethics. Yet it really helps understand history. The US Constitution, or the Civil War, or even figures like George Washington, make much more sense with an understanding the four major folkways of early America.

The four sects are:

Puritans: This bourgeois, intellectual and moralistic bunch largely originated in Eastern England. From 1629 to 1640, they settled New England, (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, etc) Archetypes would be Cotton Mather (of Salem witch trial fame), or John Adams.

Cavaliers: aristocrats and their indentured servants from class-ridden Southern England moved to the lowland South (Carolinas and Virginia) from 1642-1675. George Washington and Robert E Lee illustrate the South's gentlemanly and aristocratic ways.

Quakers: Calm and business-like (think Ben Franklin) and others from the North Midlands of England and Wales settled Pennsylvania and the rest of the Delaware Valley in 1675-1725. They invited German Mennonites and others of compatible habits to join them. Pennsylvanians spread out across the Middle West

Scots-Irish: Finally, the belligerent folks from the violent Scottish-English border region came to the Appalachian backcountry from 1718 to 1775. Their descendents spread west across the upper South. The prototype: Andy Jackson or Daniel Boone. They're typically called "Scots-Irish," although they were culturally quite different from Scottish Highlanders or Irish Catholics.

One factoid. Prior to 1856 every President but one came from a single cultural stock (eg, John Quincy Adams the Puritan). The cultural homogeneity back then was amazing. And the regions tended to vote a single way too. Now while some ethnic groups still vote heavily as a block (African-Americans vote 90% Democrat), most variation is whether married (Unmarried women voted for Kerry by a 25-point margin while married women voted for President Bush by an 11-point margin) or have children (74 percent of the variation in Bushs shares is explained by each states white fertility rate!). Thus now you can predict more based on choices (marriage and fertility) than by birth (with some exceptions), wich is a good thing.

As much as people complain about the great divide in America today, we seem significantly more agreeable than the four major cultures that founded what became the USA, each of whom considered the others savage or profane. Early America, observes John Roche, was an open country dotted with closed enclaves.

Adolescent Girls & Pregnancy

Mahalanobis — 2004-07-27T03:36:43Z

For many adolescent girls, pregnancy may be no accident.

As social scientists and health educators grapple with causes of adolescent pregnancy in the United States, some researchers suggest that one component of the problem has been largely ignored. Though most adolescent pregnancies are accidental, a substantial number of girls want to get pregnant.

Susan L. Davies, Ph.D., of the University of Alabama at Birmingham's School of Public Health and colleagues, questioned 455 low-income, African-American adolescent girls in Birmingham, Ala., aged 14-18 between 1996 and 1999, and found that nearly a quarter (23.6 percent) expressed some desire to become pregnant in the near future. /* Of 522 participants (14 to 18 years old), 67 (12.8%) [sic] were pregnant and were thus excluded from this analysis */

''Adolescent pregnancy research has predominantly focused on factors associated with pregnancy occurrence and overlooked the possibility that pregnancy is a desired outcome for some adolescents,'' Davies says. Instead, she adds, successful pregnancy prevention programs need to discern between factors that contribute to intentional versus accidental pregnancies among teen girls.

In their research, published in the August 2004 issue of Health Education & Behavior, Davies and her team tried to identify some of those factors. Self-administered questionnaires asked participants about their desire to be pregnant, their relationships with males and their birth control use.

The most striking data revealed that adolescent girls with at least some desire to be pregnant were three-and-a-half times more likely to have a boyfriend or partner at least five years older, were more than twice as likely to have had sex with a casual partner in the six months prior to the survey and also more than twice as likely to have used condoms inconsistently in the prior month.

While the researchers say the likelihood of a significantly older partner was surprising, the frequency of girls with a desire to be pregnant having casual sexual partners was more telling.

''These findings suggest that the perceived role of the male partner in parenthood, other than to assist with conception, may be minimal from the adolescent girl's perspective,'' Davies says.

Considering that adolescent girls who want to be pregnant behave in ways that will help them meet their goal, researchers say, public health practitioners and policy makers will need to address this particular population with a tailored campaign. Some suggestions the researchers make include education to help this population understand the realities of motherhood, amending health education programs that assume adolescents regard pregnancy as negatively as they view HIV and other STDs, and increasing public recognition that adolescent childbearing is ''a symptom of larger social and economic predicaments.''

Yup, teach 'em economics!

via Science Blog

German women prefer single life

Mahalanobis — 2004-07-24T01:45:56Z

BERLIN (Reuters) - More than 80 percent of single German women are perfectly happy without a man in tow and say living solo gives them more freedom to do what they want, according to a survey for Stern magazine. Coming amid mounting political alarm about Germany's low birthrate and aging population, the survey of 1,003 women showed only two percent did not enjoy their solitary lifestyle and 36 percent opted to stay single because it was more fun.

Almost half the women said they preferred single life because it was easier to keep their homes tidy and 36 percent said with no man on the scene they didn't have to endure watching sports on television.

/* ;-DDD */

Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?

Mahalanobis — 2004-07-09T22:32:58Z

"It is surprising that intellectuals oppose capitalism so. Other groups of comparable socio-economic status do not show the same degree of opposition in the same proportions. Statistically, then, intellectuals are an anomaly.

Not all intellectuals are on the "left." Like other groups, their opinions are spread along a curve. But in their case, the curve is shifted and skewed to the political left.

By intellectuals, I do not mean all people of intelligence or of a certain level of education, but those who, in their vocation, deal with ideas as expressed in words, shaping the word flow others receive. These wordsmiths include poets, novelists, literary critics, newspaper and magazine journalists, and many professors. It does not include those who primarily produce and transmit quantitatively or mathematically formulated information (the numbersmiths) or those working in visual media, painters, sculptors, cameramen. Unlike the wordsmiths, people in these occupations do not disproportionately oppose capitalism. The wordsmiths are concentrated in certain occupational sites: academia, the media, government bureaucracy..." click here to continue reading.

by Robert Nozick
Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University

via Jakub

Arab Women: Out of the shadows?

Mahalanobis — 2004-06-19T02:32:44Z

The Economist: IT WAS called a national dialogue, but to western eyes it was a strange kind of conversation. From June 13th-15th, in Medina, Saudi Arabian women and men discussed how women's lives could be improved. The women, however, were invisible to the men, except on a television screen.From kindergarten to university to the few professions they are permitted to pursue, as well as in restaurants and banks and in other public places, the female half of Saudi Arabia's population is kept strictly apart. Women are not allowed to drive a car, sail a boat or fly a plane, or to appear outdoors with hair, wrists or ankles exposed, or to travel without permission from a male guardian. A wife who angers her husband risks being hanged; that is, suspended in legal limbo, often penniless and trapped indoors, until such time as he deigns to grant a divorce. And then she will lose custody of her children... Click here to read an excellent in-depth story on the current situation for women in the arab world.

Great, approximately 50% of respondents considered the improvement of women's rights a high priority. But why is the spread between male and female respondents so low and why isn't the share of female anti-status-quo respondents higher? Yesterday at a party organized by exchange students from Hungary I spoke to an exchange student from Iran*. Since she was dressed to kill I expected that, after I asked her what she thinks about the current situation of women in Iran, she would launch a tirade against her government. Ha ha. She said everything is ok and that she can't see any reason for a change. Ha ha. I also remember a conversation with an exchange student from China the very same night and she said that her government is ok too... thanks for asking. Tiananmen Square? "I don't know much about that, but maybe they over-reacted a little".

*Despite enjoying greater freedoms than many other Islamic countries, Iranian women are treated as second class citizens. In the courts they are worth half the value of men, have fewer rights in divorce and child custody and need their husband's permission to work or travel abroad <source>.

Romance in the Information Age

Mahalanobis — 2004-05-28T15:33:08Z

Love and dating are increasingly high-tech affairswith online winking, pre-date résumés, and compatibility matching systems. But is this new world of full-disclosure and Ph.D.-certified matchmaking good for the spontaneity of romance? Or the permanence of marriage? Christine Rosen explores the hopes and miseries of love in the information age.

Tidbits:

<>The pursuit of love in its modern, technological guise has its roots in the decline of courtship and is indelibly marked by that loss. Courtship as it once existeda practice that assumed adherence to certain social conventions, and recognition of the differences, physical and emotional, between men and womenhas had its share of pleased obituarists. The most vigorous have been feminists, the more radical of whom appear to take special delight in quelling notions of romantic love. Recall Andrea Dworkins infamous equation of marriage and rape, or Germaine Greers terrifying rant in The Female Eunuch: Love, love, loveall the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness. Much of this work is merely an unpersuasive attempt to swaddle basic human bitterness in the language of female empowerment. But such sentiments have had their effect on our cultures understanding of courtship.<>

~~~

<>Like the steady work of the wrecking ball, our cultures nearly-compulsive demand for personal revelation, emotional exposure, and sharing of feelings threatens the fragile edifice of newly-forming relationships. Transparency and complete access are exactly what you want to avoid in the early stages of romance. Successful courtshipeven successful flirtationrequire the gradual peeling away of layers, some deliberately constructed, others part of a persons character and personality, that make us mysteries to each other.

Among Pascals minor works is an essay, Discourse on the Passion of Love, in which he argues for the keen pleasure of loving without daring to tell it. In love, Pascal writes, silence is of more avail than speechthere is an eloquence in silence that penetrates more deeply than language can. Pascal imagined his lovers in each others physical presence, watchful of unspoken physical gestures, but not speaking. Only gradually would they reveal themselves. Today such a tableau seems as arcane as Kabuki theater; modern couples exchange the most intimate details of their lives on a first date and then return home to blog about it.<>

Addendum:
For is love anything else than a kind of curiosity? I think not; and what makes me certain is that when the curiosity is satisfied the love disappears. -- Giacomo Casanova [Memoirs Of Casanova Volume 17: Return To Italy]

Princeton Psychos

Mahalanobis — 2004-05-24T00:27:42Z

Shoplifting Epidemic in Princeton:

PRINCETON BOROUGH, N.J. -- Authorities say Princeton University students are increasingly being caught shoplifting from the school store, with 10 Ivy League students arrested since March. Twelve students have been arrested since the installation of new security cameras in the Princeton University Store several months ago, according to a published report.

Municipal Prosecutor Marc Citron told The Times of Trenton that the shoplifting is the university's "little secret." <> Citron said the arrests have made him add to his explanations of why people shoplift. He said he used to have two reasons: people stealing to buy drugs and people with psychological problems. "And No. 3 is the Princeton University student and I am not quite sure what category they fall into," he said. "What troubles me is that some of the students feel that they are so privileged, that they have the privilege (to steal)." He said students during their court appearances have been unapologetic. <source>

via Poor and Stupid

Want more? Here we go:

CAMPUS VANDALISM - LETTER TO STUDENT BODY FROM THE USG UNDERGRADUATE LIFE COMMITTEE

A concern regarding the health & wellness of student life has been brought to the attention of the Undergraduate Life Committee. We are concerned that acts of vandalism on Princetons campus, particularly involving golf carts, are becoming increasingly frequent.

Golf cart vandalism on this campus has become endemic. During peak times, an appalling 1-2 golf carts per week must be sent to the shop because their tires are slashed, their electronics are tampered with, etc. Students often attempt to steal the golf carts. Some owners of the golf carts have irresponsibly driven them under the influence of alcohol and crashed. A student even drove a golf cart down the stairs of Blair Arch! It is astounding that a high percentage of the MTV programs operating budget goes to post-vandalism golf cart repair. Moreover, such vandalism poses a serious threat to the well being of students who need them. For example, a student with a newly broken leg faces a serious and painful burden of navigating our campus on crutches because other students thought it would be funny to turn over her golf cart.

Other general acts of campus vandalism have also been increasing. There continues to be a great deal of intentional damage to university property. Just this year, there have been up to 75 cases of vandalism. Associate Director of Public Safety, Donald Reichling stated that he has "never caught a student who was sober," when investigating an act of vandalism. Examples of vandalism include: throwing furniture through windows, stomping the flowers in Prospects Gardens, smashing the prox card readers on the doors (costing thousands of dollars in repair) and keying of cars. In addition to this vandalism, students continue to kick over trash cans, leaving them for their janitors to clean up on Monday mornings. <source>

I haven't done such things for quite a long time... I guess I am getting old ;-( .

IQ Hoax

Mahalanobis — 2004-05-19T18:34:07Z

A table purporting to show IQ by state swept through the blogosphere last week mostly because liberal bloggers enjoyed trumpeting the high correlation it showed between high-IQ and voting for Gore in 2000. Now look what I found in the print edition of The Economist. Ouch. I guess one need not be a statistician to see that the variation in the test-scores is way too high to be true (this spread would have been worth a cover story...). As other bloggers have already pointed out, the book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" (mentioned as the source of the data) is about nations, not states (it contains a table listing average IQs for 81 nations, based on 168 national IQ studies, almost all of them published in refereed scientific journals. Here is the table (scroll down) and here is the book review).

via Marginal Revolution

ad IQ-Testing: Today Austrian game theorist Ulrich Berger sent me via email his solution to this problem. Thank you! Instead of posting the simple and elegant solution (the guys at the High IQ Society don't appreciate that), I recommend looking at this site... ;-D.

Modelling Crime: Prospective hot-spot maps

Mahalanobis — 2004-05-15T10:04:33Z

The Economist: It is a cliché to say that crime spreads like a disease, but previous work by Dr Bowers and her colleagues found that this is exactly how crime does spread. Using statistical techniques developed to study the transmission of infections, they found that burglaries cluster in space and time in predictable ways. For example, properties within 400 metres of a burgled home, particularly those on the same side of the road, are at an increased risk of being broken into for up to two months after the initial incident. Using these and other findings, the team created algorithms that predict where criminals will strike next, and then used those algorithms to generate prospective hot-spot maps. These divide an area into 50-metre squaresa level of resolution chosen because 50 metres is a typical line-of-sight for a police officer in an urban areaand give a crime forecast for each square.

In their paper, Dr Bowers and her colleagues reveal the results of a study of burglaries in Merseyside, in northern England. Using historical data, they pitted their predictive modelling method against two traditional crime-mapping systems. They found that their method successfully hindcasted 62-80% of burglaries. The traditional techniques, by contrast, hindcasted only 46% of those incidents. The next step is to field-test the method, to see how effective it is in the hands of real policemen and women, when the predictions would need to be updated on a shift-by-shift basis. Each shift would add the previous shift's burglaries to the historical data, and drop the most ancient incidents from the database, before re-running the model.

More crime modelling stuff:
How do criminals locate? Crime and spatial dependence in Minas Gerais
(Frédéric Puech, March 2004)
Double Length Artificial Regressions for Testing Spatial Dependence
(Badi Baltagi & Dong Li, 2001)
Powerpoint-Presentation on Double Length Artificial Regressions
(Michael Stastny, 2002)