Here comes the DYSCALCULA epidemic

Back in grad school, whenever a statistical problem had us stumped, we would joke about having a bad case of dyscalcula, comparing ourselves to dyslexics because the problem was so puzzling we weren’t sure we understood the question, let alone had a clue about finding the answer.  Well, dyscalcula is making its real-world debut.

Oh goody! another friggin’ made-up disability just begging for an army of thumbsuckers to cater to it.  I can already see the Math Ed folks gearing up to teach college-level courses in counting your fingers.  Right behind them come the Food Nazis, who’ll jump on this to explain that dyscalcula leads to obesity due to Poor Portion Perception.  Then come the financial regulators, the traffic safety gang, the FDA, the FTC, the PTA, etc. etc.  This will be a research (and comedy) goldmine.

Dollars to donuts (that’s 2:1 for you dyscalcics), most of these poor performers catch on just fine if their baby sister tries to short them on the split of the Halloween candy or a piece of cake.

Tip from Joanne Jacobs.

Graffiti is vandalism, not art

The New Criterion calls shenanigans on graffiti masquerading as modern art

Épater la bourgeois: shocking the middle class has been a cherished goal of the avant garde since the birth of the movement in the nineteenth century. The fact that the middle class long ago enlisted themselves as co-collaborators in this project of rote titillation transformed the avant garde into a reactionary force in everything but posture and rhetoric.

If it’s so great, why don’t the yuppies get someone to graffiti their houses?

Tip from The Instapundit (as portrayed by Ed Driscoll).

Meet the Cape-a-Bility Challenge

59,000 of us got jobs, but all another 6,000 of them got were these stupid capes.  I wonder how the capes will look on their resumes…

Tip from Drudge, who couldn’t permalink his a$$.

Let’s push the “abstract behavior rules”

The latest in NewSpeak is renaming Easter Eggs as “spring spheres”.

We were doing some linguistic horsing around yesterday, and decided “spring spheres” lacked any sort of multicultural element.  We decided to call them “cojones colorados.”  That should provoke some discussion.

Tip from the Corner.

Think harder! Work smarter! Buy a stopwatch!

Matthew Stewart blows the lid off the MBA; he suggests a degree in philosophy might be more useful (and insightful).

The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn’t seem to matter. As a principal and founding partner of a consulting firm that eventually grew to 600 employees, I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking,” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.”

He’s not a big fan of Taylorism or any of its successors, either.

Mayo’s work sheds light on the dark side of the “humanist” tradition in management theory. There is something undeniably creepy about a clipboard-bearing man hovering around a group of factory women, flicking the lights on and off and dishing out candy bars. All of that humanity—as anyone in my old firm could have told you—was just a more subtle form of bureaucratic control. It was a way of harnessing the workers’ sense of identity and well-being to the goals of the organization, an effort to get each worker to participate in an ever more refined form of her own enslavement.

But of course, there IS a purpose to MBA programs. Read the article to find out what.

Update (16 April).  David Glenn blows the whistle on B-School in the Chronicle.  Cheese it, you guys!  Keep writing this kind of stuff, our business is gonna dry up.

“Multicultural” has officially Jumped the Shark

A few years back, one of my hipper students cracked up a lecture when I started sketching a diagram using colored chalks. “Oooh, DIVERSITY CHALK!” she quipped, and the entire class–Black, Anglo, and (mainly) Mexicano–convulsed in laughter. Now the joke’s on her, with Crayola’s new line of “Multicultural” markers:

With this product, I think “multicultural” has finally achieved that pinnacle of marketing status, the Cool But Meaningless Adjective, right up there with organic, lemon-fresh, green, easy-open, new-look, and chipotle.

Is it just me, or does it seem a bit insensitive to proclaim all these colors to be washable?  Last time I checked, neither Black, White, nor Brown was something we could wash off…

Tip from Joanne Jacobs.

Try the new Totalitarian Diet

Hugo Chavez has a new anti-obesity campaign,  “We are eating better, that’s been proven. We’re leaving malnutrition behind. It no longer exists in the country, but be careful with obesity.”   Think it might have anything to do with this?

Wusses in Washington

Did I miss the memo about Senator Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) having his penis removed?  Next thing you know, Harry Reid will be crying because some Tea Partier made a mean face at him.

Simpson’s Paradox bites Paul Krugman on the ass

Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman makes an undergrad mistake in educational statistics, and Iowahawk takes time out from redneck hotrodding to call him on it, with deadly effect.

Best line ever in a statistics post:  “Mr. Krugman (please note – I don’t call anyone “Doctor” unless they can write me a prescription for drugs) doesn’t mention where he gets his dropout statistic from. I suspect a database somewhere in his lower intestine.”

Note to Krugman:  search for Simpson’s Paradox on Wikipedia.

Update (6 March).  Iowahawk answers his critics, many of whom think Appeal to Authority is epistemologically superior to Run the Friggin’ Numbers.  Hey, science is tough, especially for educated idiots who don’t even know what it is.

Pay no attention to the man before the curtain

British Foreign Secretary William Hague takes the concept “if you can’t blind them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit” to a whole new level.