Links for 2010-06-22

"But what I think people meant about [Manute] Bol's "killer instinct" was that he never seemed to take the game of basketball quite seriously enough. He hadn't chosen this game, it had chosen him. It discovered him in that Sudanese village and plucked him out of it, whisking him halfway around the world. All for the sake of a game.

ManuteNancy Bol always seemed bewildered and slightly amused by that. Eugene McCarthy said that politics was like being a football coach, "You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important."

Manute Bol never seemed to master the second part of that equation. He always seemed to think we Americans were a little crazy, imagining that this game was such an important thing. It was never the most important thing to him. He had other priorities."

"The focus of both studies is on questions that show "differential item functioning," known by its acronym DIF. A DIF question is one on which students "matched by proficiency" and other factors have variable scores, predictably by race, on selected questions. A DIF question has notable differences between black and white (or, in theory, other subsets of students) whose educational background and skill set suggest that they should get similar scores. The 2003 study and this year's found no DIF issues in the mathematics section.

But what Freedle found in 2003 has now been confirmed independently by the new study: that some kinds of verbal questions have a DIF for black and white students. On some of the easier verbal questions, the two studies found that a DIF favored white students. On some of the most difficult verbal questions, the DIF favored black students. "

Careful analysis of a clip from Commando suggests that Schwarzenegger is made of titanium.

"This was my first time attending the World Science Festival as I signed up to volunteer months ago, otherwise I have no affiliation with WSF or any of the funding foundations. My thoughts are my own and I feel I am in a position to judge this event without bias. [...] What follows is my transcription of the dialogue. I attempt to type out exactly what was said while inserting some thoughts of my own."