Is it that time of year already?
Come help us data-mine our “large repository of individual-level data” in order to advance individual freedom, hooray!
Political Technology to Advance Free Market Principles
Folks, this job is for i-360, the leading data and technology provider for the pro-free market political and advocacy community, supporting organizations that promote free enterprise and smaller government. i360 is a dynamic workplace sitting on the leading edge of politics, technology, and business and we are seeking team members who are as excited about our cause as they are about building the next generation of political technology.
Data Scientist – Alexandria, VA linkedin.com
A Center for Shared Services client seeks a Data Scientist to discover actionable insights using a large repository of individual-level data. The ideal candidate is someone who has significant analytical experience with very large datasets and is looking to leverage that knowledge to make a difference in economic freedom.
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And now, a musical interlude
Haha great April Fools’ prank oh wait…
1. Read this in the Daily Cal.
“Introduced by Assemblymember Scott Wilk, R-Santa Clarita, the “New University of California” will not provide any instruction but only grant degrees to students who pass a certain number of examinations”
2. Outrage!
3. Notice the date, April 1. Have a good chuckle.
5. Find the text of Assembly Bill 1306 online
(d) (1) The New University of California shall provide no instruction, but shall issue college credit and baccalaureate and associate degrees to any person capable of passing examinations.
5a. :-/
Actually, I can see where something like this could be useful; it’s like a state-sponsored version of CLEP. The problem is pretending that tests are substitutes for classes. What college graduates come out with is not just content knowledge; it’s having stuck something out for four years, even when it was difficult or boring. Content knowledge is great, but without impulse control it’s not worth much.
How can you tell if someone is prejudiced? By looking at the shape of his face, of course…?
Facial Structure Is Indicative of Explicit Support for Prejudicial Beliefs
Eric Hehman, Jordan B. Leitner, Matthew P. Deegan, and Samuel L. Gaertner
Can you tell whether someone has prejudicial beliefs based on their facial structure? In the last of three experiments, White and Black participants were shown pictures of White male faces and were asked to rate how prejudiced they thought each target was. Not only were pictures of targets with greater facial width-to-height ratios (fWHR) judged to be more prejudiced, but participants’ ratings of the targets correlated with the targets’ reported endorsement of prejudicial beliefs. Greater fWHR has been found to be related to higher levels of dominance and testosterone in men. It could be that men with a greater fWHR are less inhibited and are therefore more willing to report their racial prejudices.
Swag coming soon
Great Moments in Representative Democracy
He just wants to know if E.Coli can evolve into a person. Honest question.
Jurassic Park for humans
How could you work this into a murder mystery?
SPIEGEL: Wouldn’t it be ethically problematic to create a Neanderthal just for the sake of scientific curiosity?
Church: Well, curiosity may be part of it, but it’s not the most important driving force. The main goal is to increase diversity. The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity. This is true for culture or evolution, for species and also for whole societies. If you become a monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing. Therefore the recreation of Neanderthals would be mainly a question of societal risk avoidance.
SPIEGEL: Setting aside all ethical doubts, do you believe it is technically possible to reproduce the Neanderthal?
Church: The first thing you have to do is to sequence the Neanderthal genome, and that has actually been done. The next step would be to chop a human genome up into, say, 10,000 chunks and then synthesize these. Finally, you would introduce these chunks into a human stem cell. If we do that often enough, then we would generate a stem cell line that would get closer and closer to the corresponding sequence of the Neanderthal. We developed the semi-automated procedure required to do that in my lab. Finally, we assemble all the chunks in a human stem cell, which would enable you to finally create a Neanderthal clone.
SPIEGEL: And the surrogates would be human, right? In your book you write that an “extremely adventurous female human” could serve as the surrogate mother.
Church: Yes. However, the prerequisite would, of course, be that human cloning is acceptable to society.
SPIEGEL: Could you also stop the procedure halfway through and build a 50-percent Neanderthal using this technology.
Church: You could and you might. It could even be that you want just a few mutations from the Neanderthal genome. Suppose you were too realize: Wow, these five mutations might change the neuronal pathways, the skull size, a few key things. They could give us what we want in terms of neural diversity. I doubt that we are going to particularly care about their facial morphology, though (laughs).
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