bromang's comments

Starting Strength and only primarily targets the ability to lift heavy objects. On its own it does nothing to improve your cardio fitness and it doesn't directly help with postural problems or injury prevention. And if your main interest is in gaining muscle and looking better, there are much better routines. In all the gyms I've been to, I've yet to see a big guy who was doing a stripped down strength focused routine... Finally, it also has to be noted that many people do not have good experiences with the big barbell exercises, especially if they have pre-existing issues with their knees/back/shoulders, even if they use good form.

from the wiki article on nicotine:

"no epidemiological evidence supports that nicotine alone acts as a carcinogen in the formation of human cancer "

" Is it because asians are that much more naturally gifted?"

Why not?

The effect "could be large". Do you have any data to support this?

Some forms of coaching "add over 100". Do you have data to support this?

Poor black/hispanic kids don't have test prep programs in school. So they are unable to get privately provided test prep or have no incentive to do so, and therefore receive a smaller amount of test prep than other racial groups. Do you have any data to support this?

The effects of a superior school "could be large". Do you have any data to support this?

You also say that you learned a lot from black and hispanic pupils. Would you have learned less from white pupils?

The right way to do "education selection" is to pick the best students from your applicant pool. I don't see what would be wrong with that method.

In reality it is simply not possible to create such gains on average. SAT score is still a very good predictor of future academic performance.

"Does test preparation help improve student performance on the SAT and ACT? For students that have taken the test before and would like to boost their scores, coaching seems to help, but by a rather small amount. After controlling for group differences, the average coaching boost on the math section of the SAT is 14 to 15 points. The boost is smaller on the verbal section of the test, just 6 to 8 points. The combined effect of coaching on the SAT for the NELS sample is about 20 points."

http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionst...

It cannot be coached very easily. See http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionst....

"Does test preparation help improve student performance on the SAT and ACT? For students that have taken the test before and would like to boost their scores, coaching seems to help, but by a rather small amount. After controlling for group differences, the average coaching boost on the math section of the SAT is 14 to 15 points. The boost is smaller on the verbal section of the test, just 6 to 8 points. The combined effect of coaching on the SAT for the NELS sample is about 20 points."

This sort of hype article pops up every few years in the British press. Perhaps there is an increasing trend in students attending US universities, but it is always going to be a small number, and almost all of them will be private school pupils with rich parents.

I suspect it isn't hard to find papers that show a link between high debt levels and weak economic growth. Or do you think the consensus among economists is that no such relationship exists?

There is no serious rebuttal or debunking of Mcintyre contained within that post. Even if we ignore the details of that specific controversy, it is still obvious that there are

1) big problems in the climate science community with regard to data and replicability (see climateaudit for more than you could ever want)

2) massive statistical problems with reconstructions. See Mcshane and Wyner 2011.

This is not a credible source.

This article has a pretty bad smell. The author makes a lot of fairly extreme claims but these are mostly based on his own anecdotes or non public data sets. The claims that

"you can separate all advanced math teachers easily into two categories: Okay with blacks in their classroom [...] Not okay with blacks in their classroom. Whites end up succeeding, blacks end up failing"

and

"the evidence shows that teacher recommendations have zero correlation with aptitude in a field"

are really quite dubious and almost certainly false. How did they measure whether they were "okay with blacks in their classroom"? As many others have said in the original thread, this is probably a hoax.

What is the trend for the overall number rather than percentage of tenured college professors? Surely a large part of this is explained by the explosive growth of higher education as a consumer commodity. We should not expect the percentage of professors to increase if the demand for academics is being driven by an increasing number of lower quality colleges.

I would be very sceptical about using weight training, and squatting and deadlifting in particular, as remedies for back pain. These exercises can bad for you if you have pre-existing issues, EVEN if performed with proper form. Exercise is obviously useful, but I see no clear reason why putting your body under serious loads is a good idea. Most serious amateur powerlifters and bodybuilders, for example, end up suffering from back/knee/shoulder issues at some point. Posture and mobility deficiencies can be improved in other ways, but this normally requires more thought than hitting the free weights.

I think this view of things is a bit misguided. Most of the jobs available to those who should not go to college are not traditional trades. Effective vocational training has to be focused on service sector and administrative jobs as much as "traditional skilled labour",

But it is not obviously unfair or wrong. The students are separated according to ability, not the colour of their skin.

The streaming can and should be done through aptitude tests and competitive examinations. Your story is quite unfortunate but there are better ways of separating pupils by ability.

The second question makes no sense unless you have some quasi-religious pre determined belief in the cognitive equality of different racial groups.

Competition in action, reducing prices for consumers. I like it!

Should we ignore demographics? Why?