Republican men are the most politically informed

Despite not trusting the media they get their news from, Republicans are more informed about current events than Democrats are. The latest evidence comes from the most recent installment of Pew's News IQ series of quizzes given to a random sample of adults in the US. Of the 12 questions posed, Republicans fared better on 11 of them, the lone exception having to do with allowing illegal immigrants to remain in the US. That's just as well, since the...

Fewer cribs beneath brick and cold steel piping

As a small supplement to Jayman's neat post on population density and fertility in the developed world, here's what the GSS shows us regarding the mean number of children among whites aged 40-65 when the question was asked in the mid-nineties and again in 2000 by the type of community they live in. The descriptions are pretty self-explanatory, but to avoid unnecessary confusion are listed from the most densely populated to the least so:CommunityKidsBig...

Partisan perceptions of media bias

Of the 13 major media outlets queried about by Pew, the only one Republicans trust more than Democrats do is Fox News. "Question everything" is a tired phrase leftists often employ as a means of obtaining morally posturing cheap grace, but the late George Carlin's proscription of it characterizes those on the right better than it does those on the left, at least when...

What Todd Akin really meant!

Estimating liberally to include not only "legitimate" rapes but also unsuccessful perceived attempts compiled by advocacy groups with the stated purpose of stamping out sexual assault, 1 in 6 women will be victimized at some point during their lives. Not all of these will occur during the period of a woman's life when she's fertile, but with the aim of overshooting if anything, for the sake of argument assume they do.There are a few days every four...

Profiling immigrants

Using the latest Census Bureau data from 2010 and 2011, the Center for Immigration Studies recently released a comprehensive report profiling the country's foreign-born population and comparing it with her native children. Parse and peruse as much as you're inclined to. Some points of interest I gleaned:- Immigrants are more willing to work and work harder when they do so than natives do, right? Among those aged 18-65, yes, technically, by a statistical...

White privilege overtakes institutional racism

In the standard MG mold, a comprehensive (and bar none for reference purposes) post mocking the spurious explanations for disparities in outcomes among members of different racial and ethnic groups references the phrase "institutional racism", noting that it seems to have been replaced by the (even more) amorphous "white privilege". Perspicacious writer, that MG. The percentage...

Dragon Quest VIII quotes and quotations

For most who don't come upon this via search engine, this post should be skipped.One of the more enjoyable entertainment experiences I've had over the last decade or so was a playing through of the PlayStation II SquareEnix game, Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King, as my reflections on the game clearly attest. A lot of nostalgia there, and as longtime readers will...

That'll Costa

The skill set required for successfully conducting broadcast public interviews is not a relevant one for most people to have. But for those who are in the business, I wonder if there are any protocols, spoken or unspoken, against giving distracting verbal cues to show that, I guess, as the interviewer, you are indeed listening to the person you're interviewing.Rebecca Costa demonstrates what I mean only too well. Scroll down to the interview with...

Buy you a new life

Moved by data rather than doctrine, Inductivist listed the percentages of respondents in the World Values Survey who said "wanting to get rich" sounded either "very much like me" or "like me" by country. Despite the putative obsession Americans have with money, the US ranks 41st out of 52 countries when it comes to (admitting to) really wanting the benjamins. A cursory glance at the list is enough to see that the poorer, less desirable the place,...

Amassing mass

Prior to last week, excepting routine dental cleanings I hadn't been a medical patient in any capacity for nearly a decade. I have full employer-provided health coverage I've never used and I'm pushing thirty now, though, so it seemed as good a time as any to schedule a physical.Oh no! With a body mass index of over 27 (the commonly used statistic for assessing overweight...

IQ estimates from wordsum scores by ethnicity and community type

++Addition++Great comments. Using the GSS, Jason Malloy replicates what other studies have found regarding the urban/rural IQ gap in the US--that it has shrunk appreciably over the last three generations, but not due to rural areas catching up with urban ones. Instead, urban areas appear to have regressed while rural areas have treaded water:I looked at urban/rural differences by birth cohort. white's born 1900-1940 93 rural 100 suburb 102 city...