i’ve got to say this, in spite of the fact that it’s been said in various ways already, but BUSH IS A TOTAL FUCKING IDIOT!!!
Create an e-annoyance, go to jail
By Declan McCullagh
Published: January 9, 2006, 4:00 AM PST
Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.
It’s no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.
In other words, it’s OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess.
This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.
“The use of the word ‘annoy’ is particularly problematic,” says Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “What’s annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone else.”
Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called “Preventing Cyberstalking.” It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet “without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy.”
To grease the rails for this idea, Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, and the section’s other sponsors slipped it into an unrelated, must-pass bill to fund the Department of Justice. The plan: to make it politically infeasible for politicians to oppose the measure.
The tactic worked. The bill cleared the House of Representatives by voice vote, and the Senate unanimously approved it Dec. 16.
There’s an interesting side note. An earlier version that the House approved in September had radically different wording. It was reasonable by comparison, and criminalized only using an “interactive computer service” to cause someone “substantial emotional harm.”
That kind of prohibition might make sense. But why should merely annoying someone be illegal?
There are perfectly legitimate reasons to set up a Web site or write something incendiary without telling everyone exactly who you are.
Think about it: A woman fired by a manager who demanded sexual favors wants to blog about it without divulging her full name. An aspiring pundit hopes to set up the next Suck.com. A frustrated citizen wants to send e-mail describing corruption in local government without worrying about reprisals.
In each of those three cases, someone’s probably going to be annoyed. That’s enough to make the action a crime. (The Justice Department won’t file charges in every case, of course, but trusting prosecutorial discretion is hardly reassuring.)
Clinton Fein, a San Francisco resident who runs the Annoy.com site, says a feature permitting visitors to send obnoxious and profane postcards through e-mail could be imperiled.
“Who decides what’s annoying? That’s the ultimate question,” Fein said. He added: “If you send an annoying message via the United States Post Office, do you have to reveal your identity?”
Fein once sued to overturn part of the Communications Decency Act that outlawed transmitting indecent material “with intent to annoy.” But the courts ruled the law applied only to obscene material, so Annoy.com didn’t have to worry.
“I’m certainly not going to close the site down,” Fein said on Friday. “I would fight it on First Amendment grounds.”
He’s right. Our esteemed politicians can’t seem to grasp this simple point, but the First Amendment protects our right to write something that annoys someone else.
It even shields our right to do it anonymously. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas defended this principle magnificently in a 1995 case involving an Ohio woman who was punished for distributing anonymous political pamphlets.
If President Bush truly believed in the principle of limited government (it is in his official bio), he’d realize that the law he signed cannot be squared with the Constitution he swore to uphold.
And then he’d repeat what President Clinton did a decade ago when he felt compelled to sign a massive telecommunications law. Clinton realized that the section of the law punishing abortion-related material on the Internet was unconstitutional, and he directed the Justice Department not to enforce it.
Bush has the chance to show his respect for what he calls Americans’ personal freedoms. Now we’ll see if the president rises to the occasion.
When they took the fourth amendment,
I was quiet because I didn’t deal drugs.
When they took the sixth amendment,
I was quiet because I was innocent.
When they took the second amendment,
I was quiet because I didn’t own a gun.
Now they’ve taken the first amendment,
and I can say nothing about it.
unfortunately, this is now the case…
now what this means, for me, (apart from the fact that this is a clear violation of my first amendment rights) is that i have to take down the pages on The Church of Tina Chopp that detail our long, involved, and very amusing interaction with An Evil Anti-Tinite Whose Name We Dare Not Mention (because of previous interactions with her which were annoying, and possibly somewhat more than that as well), because she can now say that the existence of said pages are an annoyance to her, despite the fact that she’s the one who started the whole thing to begin with! furthermore, it’s remotely possible that she, or someone like her, will say that The Church of Tina Chopp, by it’s mere existence, annoys them (after all, that’s one of the most salient features of the organisation), and we will have to take the whole site offline!
SOMEBODY NEEDS TO ASSSASINATE THIS ASS,
before he turns this country into a modern version of Nazi Germany!!!
projects like The Free Network Project are essential at this time, but i’m serious… somebody really needs to look into the possibility of going apeshit on his ass with a semiautomatic!
U.S. limits commitment to global warming solutions at Canadian conference
Highlight:
At an environmental conference in Canada that brought together 189 countries, the United States, represented by Chief U.S. climate negotiator Harlan Watson, refused to make pledges to fight global warming past the year 2012, angering many European countries and activist organizations.
Summary:
- The United States ruled out making extra pledges to fight global warming beyond 2012 on Tuesday, angering environmentalists who accused Washington of blocking a 189-nation conference in Canada.
- “The United States is opposed to any such discussions,” Watson told a news conference of Canadian proposals to launch talks under the U.N.’s climate convention about new actions to combat global warming beyond 2012.
- Environmentalists accused Washington of doing too little to fight a rise in temperatures from human activities that could lead to more storms, expanding deserts and worse floods, and could raise sea levels by up to three feet (one meter) by 2100.
- “The failure of the United States to be willing to discuss future action here is the real issue,” he said, predicting Washington will only join a global pact after Bush leaves office.
- Bush pulled out in 2001 of the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol, under which about 40 industrial nations have to cut greenhouse gas emissions by about 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.
- At Montreal, Kyoto backers plan to launch talks, likely to last several years, on new commitments beyond 2012.
- Bush branded Kyoto too costly and said it wrongly excluded poor countries.
- Many also hope to start wider parallel talks among all countries, including the United States and developing nations such as China and India, on new ways to fight climate change.
- She said that new tougher measures were urgently needed to combat rising temperatures.
- And British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a speech earlier on Tuesday that he believed that all major economies would sign up for a binding accord to succeed Kyoto.
- But Watson reiterated that Washington had no plans to adopt Kyoto-style caps on emissions and rejected environmentalists’ predictions that the U.S. was dooming the conference to failure.
now we’ve been over this before… global warming is a fact! it’s not just some scare tactic that has been created by “environmentalists,” scientists and hippy-tree-huggers to get us to pay attention to them, it has been proven… DESPITE WHAT SHRUB AND CRONIES WANT US TO BELIEVE, and if we’re going to do something about it other than IMMANENTIZE THE ESCHATON (which is apparently what the dominionists want to do), we’re going to have to make plans for a lot longer in the future than 2012… have i mentioned recently that it has become necessary to
ASSSASINATE THIS ASS,
before he turns this planet into a deserted wasteland!!!
Orwell could have a case against Bush
Presidential pronouncements may too-closely reflect a familiar literary style
Tuesday, January 3, 2006
By Steve Young
Lawyers for the estate of George Orwell have announced their intention to sue President Bush for plagiarism.
“We have long believed that this administration has stolen much of its policy from Mr. Orwell’s writings,” said attorney Will Bilyalotz. “Expressly, ‘1984’ and ‘Animal Farm.’ In some cases, like the illegal surveillance of its own citizens, this administration has lifted the passages word for word from ‘1984.’ Just changing the year doesn’t protect the president from copyright laws.”
White House spokesman Scott McClellan, while refusing to comment directly because of the “ongoing investigation,” reminded reporters that the Patriot Act had given the president the power to suspend copyright laws and, anyway, “No one can own words.”
Legal experts believe proving copyright infringement will not be easy. “Even if he is guilty, the president’s propensity for adapting Mr. Orwell’s ‘1984’ newspeak is so effortless, as if he made up the words himself,” said law professor Sue Yu Atdropohat. “Illegal borrowing of words or even fictional characters from published works has a high threshold of proof. The producers of the film ‘Being There’ have had their lawsuit against the Bush campaign tied up in court since 2000. After all, one man’s outright theft of ideas is another man’s malapropos.”
“Personally, I think this so-called intelligentsia is just jealous,” said Newt Gingrich. “Orwell could have only dreamed of great terms like ‘defeatist’ and ‘evil-doer.'”
Bilyalotz differs. “The president’s comments like, ‘This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table,’ is plain and simple, Mr. Orwell’s ‘doublethink’ (the power to hold two completely contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accept both of them).”
The president has regularly pointed out that he will do whatever it takes to defeat terrorism, and that those who want to hamstring his ability to steal written material are only aiding the enemy. “9/11 has made us look at our plagiarism in a different way,” said the president. “As long as I am president or king, the American people expect me to do everything in my power under our laws and Constitution to protect them and their civil liberties. And if that takes dissolving the Constitution, then so be it.”
“It was Mr. Orwell in ‘1984’ who first came up with ‘Victory Mansions’ and industrial-grade ‘Victory Gin.’ Now the president calls his book, a ‘National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.’ The president doesn’t go 10 seconds without using the word ‘victory.’ One doesn’t have to be a math whiz to put two and two together. Our greatest concern is not that the president uses Mr. Orwell’s words,” Bilyalotz said, “but that he’s actually using ‘1984’ as a governmental guidebook, and I’m afraid the president hasn’t read how it ends.”
In his weekly radio address, Bush said the “Spy on US” program has been reviewed regularly by the nation’s top legal authorities and Fox talk-show hosts, targeting only those people with “a clear link to these terrorist networks, which include Al-Jazeera and CNN.”
“Freedom is in its last throes,” Vice President Dick Cheney said. “First, they take away torture, now they want to take away spying on our own citizens. What’s next to go, Fox News?”
The revelation of the unauthorized bugging has delayed renewal of the Patriot Act, which includes a provision giving President Bush monarchial powers. “Not only will it make this country safer,” explained the president, “but it will ordain either Jenna or Barb as the country’s first queen without the risk of voter fraud or expensive campaigns.”
“This country is ready for a female queen,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, “and we can’t take the chance that the next election could turn out to be a mushroom cloud.”
In other Patriot Act news, the White House has asked historians to remove Ben Franklin’s quote, “They that give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety” from history books. “It’s wordy and confusing,” Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said. “And one thing this country doesn’t need in its fight against terrorism is more confusing words. At least that’s what we feel here in the Ministry of Truth.”
now i’ve been saying essentially the same thing ever since 9/11 but until now, nobody has been listening… hopefully people are starting to get the idea…
Fear destroys what bin Laden could not
ROBERT STEINBACK
One wonders if Osama bin Laden didn’t win after all. He ruined the America that existed on 9/11. But he had help.
If, back in 2001, anyone had told me that four years after bin Laden’s attack our president would admit that he broke U.S. law against domestic spying and ignored the Constitution — and then expect the American people to congratulate him for it — I would have presumed the girders of our very Republic had crumbled.
Had anyone said our president would invade a country and kill 30,000 of its people claiming a threat that never, in fact, existed, then admit he would have invaded even if he had known there was no threat — and expect America to be pleased by this — I would have thought our nation’s sensibilities and honor had been eviscerated.
If I had been informed that our nation’s leaders would embrace torture as a legitimate tool of warfare, hold prisoners for years without charges and operate secret prisons overseas — and call such procedures necessary for the nation’s security — I would have laughed at the folly of protecting human rights by destroying them.
If someone had predicted the president’s staff would out a CIA agent as revenge against a critic, defy a law against domestic propaganda by bankrolling supposedly independent journalists and commentators, and ridicule a 37-year Marine Corps veteran for questioning U.S. military policy — and that the populace would be more interested in whether Angelina is about to make Brad a daddy — I would have called the prediction an absurd fantasy.
That’s no America I know, I would have argued. We’re too strong, and we’ve been through too much, to be led down such a twisted path.
What is there to say now?
All of these things have happened. And yet a large portion of this country appears more concerned that saying ”Happy Holidays” could be a disguised attack on Christianity.
I evidently have a lot poorer insight regarding America’s character than I once believed, because I would have expected such actions to provoke — speaking metaphorically now — mobs with pitchforks and torches at the White House gate. I would have expected proud defiance of anyone who would suggest that a mere terrorist threat could send this country into spasms of despair and fright so profound that we’d follow a leader who considers the law a nuisance and perfidy a privilege.
Never would I have expected this nation — which emerged stronger from a civil war and a civil rights movement, won two world wars, endured the Depression, recovered from a disastrous campaign in Southeast Asia and still managed to lead the world in the principles of liberty — would cower behind anyone just for promising to “protect us.”
President Bush recently confirmed that he has authorized wiretaps against U.S. citizens on at least 30 occasions and said he’ll continue doing it. His justification? He, as president — or is that king? — has a right to disregard any law, constitutional tenet or congressional mandate to protect the American people.
Is that America’s highest goal — preventing another terrorist attack? Are there no principles of law and liberty more important than this? Who would have remembered Patrick Henry had he written, “What’s wrong with giving up a little liberty if it protects me from death?”
Bush would have us excuse his administration’s excesses in deference to the ”war on terror” — a war, it should be pointed out, that can never end. Terrorism is a tactic, an eventuality, not an opposition army or rogue nation. If we caught every person guilty of a terrorist act, we still wouldn’t know where tomorrow’s first-time terrorist will strike. Fighting terrorism is a bit like fighting infection — even when it’s beaten, you must continue the fight or it will strike again.
Are we agreeing, then, to give the king unfettered privilege to defy the law forever? It’s time for every member of Congress to weigh in: Do they believe the president is above the law, or bound by it?
Bush stokes our fears, implying that the only alternative to doing things his extralegal way is to sit by fitfully waiting for terrorists to harm us. We are neither weak nor helpless. A proud, confident republic can hunt down its enemies without trampling legitimate human and constitutional rights.
Ultimately, our best defense against attack — any attack, of any sort — is holding fast and fearlessly to the ideals upon which this nation was built. Bush clearly doesn’t understand or respect that. Do we?
answer… NO!
Global IQ: 1950-2050
Doesn’t it seem like the world is getting dumber with every passing year? Well, maybe it is!
In IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Lynn and Vanhanen[1] report large differences, amounting to more than two standard deviations, in the mean IQ of the populations of different countries around the world, and find that these mean population IQ scores correlate more strongly with economic development as measured by gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and long term economic growth than any other single factor.
It has been widely observed that the birthrate of countries tends to fall as they become more wealthy. Most countries in Western Europe now have birthrates below the replacement rate; in the absence of immigration, their populations can be expected to fall in the future.
Putting these two pieces of information together, one might expect that since low IQ countries tend to be less wealthy, they should also be expected to have higher birthrates than countries with high IQ. If population IQ and wealth remain constant, the average IQ of the world should then fall over time, since a larger portion of population growth will occur in low IQ countries. There are a lot of assumptions going into this conclusion, starting out with what IQ measures and what, if anything, it means. See the “Quarrels, Questions, and Answers” section below for discussion of some of these issues.
| Year |
Population×109 |
Mean IQ |
| 1950 |
2.55 |
91.64 |
| 1975 |
4.08 |
90.80 |
| 2000 |
6.07 |
89.20 |
| 2025 |
7.82 |
87.81 |
| 2050 |
9.06 |
86.32 |
The animation above shows the global histogram of IQ and global mean IQ for the hundred year period from 1950 through 2050. Mean population IQ is taken from Lynn and Vanhanen’s[1] figures and yearly population estimates for each country from the U.S. Census Bureau International Data Base 2003[3]. Taking these figures at face value, we find that world population and mean IQ evolve at 25 year intervals over the century as given in the table at the right.
Methodology
The mean IQ of 185 countries, measured and estimated in Lynn and Vanhanen[1], were taken as the invariant IQ of each country over the 1950-2050 time period. (The figures are given in terms of countries existing as of the year 2000. For countries which came into being in the preceding 50 years due to decolonisation, breakup of the Soviet Union, etc., years prior to independence refer to the territory with borders identical to the present-day country. The list of countries includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, considered in some sense provinces of China, but with large populations, well measured demographically, and economic performance distinctly different from that of the People’s Republic; and Puerto Rico, a United States territory with different demographics than the parent country. The remaining 182 countries include all independent countries with populations greater than 50,000 with the exception of Bosnia and Herzegovina, for which no data were available due to the conflict throughout most of the 1990s.)
The 100 year population history and forecast for the 185 countries with measured or estimated mean IQ was obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau International Data Base 2003[3], using the mid-year population estimate or projection for each year.
For each year in the hundred year period, each country’s estimated population for that year was apportioned into bins of 5 IQ points using a normal distribution with the mean IQ for the country from Lynn and Vanhanen and the 15 point standard deviation defined for IQ scores. These country histogram bins were summed to create a global histogram for each year. Global mean IQ was computed by an average of country IQs weighted by their population.
Quarrels, Questions, and Answers
- Don’t differing IQ figures for various countries simply measure cultural bias in the tests?
- This is a possibility, and in certain cases undoubtedly plays a factor. Yet tests carefully designed to exclude cultural bias (for example, spatial relationship tests based entirely on pictures, memorisation of digit sequences, and pure eye-hand reaction time) produce results comparable to those of traditional IQ tests. Further, if IQ tests embody cultural biases of the largely U.K. and U.S. creators of the tests, it’s odd that populations of East Asian countries, with a variety of very different cultures, all test higher than those of the test makers.
- Won’t economic development reduce the rate of population growth in the low-IQ countries?
- Future population estimates for countries in the Census Bureau database already take this into account. These are, of course, consensus estimates which do not take into effect such impossible-to-forecast circumstances as environmental crises, plague, bad asteroid days, or, on the other hand, technological breakthroughs which accelerate economic development in third world countries. Looking 50 years ahead, only rapid demographic shifts in the near term will have much impact on the figures for 2050, since the parents of adults of that year are already mostly alive today.
- Lynn and Vanhanen only actually have IQ data for 81 countries and they’ve estimated the rest. How reliable are those estimates?
- I don’t know. In most cases their estimates were made by averaging known IQs of adjacent countries with similar demographic mix. In the few cases of countries with ethnically diverse populations, they estimated IQ based on a weighted average of IQs of the country of origin of each group. They tested this process by using it to estimate IQ of several countries with known IQ and the results correspond well with the measured IQs of those countries. Still, one should bear in mind that 56% of the country IQ figures are estimated, and not based on any actual in-country measurement at all.
- And those 81 countries they have IQ data for–there seem to be an awful lot of fudge factors used in computing the numbers they cite in the tables. How trustworthy are they?
- Fudge factors? Indeed. . . . More than 25 pages are devoted to explaining the “adjustments”, “corrections”, “calibrations”, and “weightings” which go into that table of 81 numbers. The state of the raw data is more or less hideous. There is no regular, standardised measurement of IQ in nations of the world. One is forced to use sporadic studies, published at widely spaced intervals, using a variety of tests with more or less cultural bias, on populations which may exhibit a variety of selection effects. (For example, if you only test high school children in a country where 75% of children do not attend high school, you can’t expect your results to be representative of the population as a whole.) Still, if you want to do this research, you have work with the data at hand.
If population mean IQ indeed correlates strongly with economic performance, then measuring IQ figures for developing countries and studying ways to increase IQ could play an important rôle in development assistance. A UNESCO program to regularly measure IQ of, say, 16 year olds in all countries could provide hard data and, potentially, by permitting assessment of the effectiveness of programs such as nutrition aid for mothers and infants, educational initiatives, etc., do a world of good. Alas, this entire topic is so politically radioactive there is little likelihood of this ever happening.
- You’re assuming the mean IQ of countries won’t change over the hundred year period. How valid is that assumption?
- Apart from the Flynn effect (discussed below), which doesn’t seem to have much effect on the relative IQs of countries, in cases where the data are available, national mean IQ does not seem to have varied much over the last 50 years. As long as the population makeup and general circumstances of a country don’t change, it’s reasonable to expect the mean IQ for a given country to remain much the same over the next 50 years. Population migration, however, can have substantial effects and is not taken into account in these data. The Census Bureau population estimates include migration, but the assumption of constant mean IQ may be invalid when the population of a given country consists of a large fraction of immigrants from regions with different mean IQ. This is particularly the case for Western Europe, where the indigenous population has fertility below the replacement rate, and the population includes an increasing proportion of immigrants predominantly from regions with lower mean IQ. To the extent immigrants have more children per family than the original population, the effect is magnified. Whether immigrant populations converge toward the original IQ of their new country as they assimilate is an open question. In all, since most present day and anticipated future population migration is from lower IQ to higher IQ countries, assuming constant IQ probably biases the global mean forecasts toward the high end.
- Won’t the Flynn effect compensate for the downward demographic shift in IQ?
- The Flynn effect is an undisputed yet enigmatic aspect of IQ testing. Shortly after the first IQ tests were standardised, it was observed that the scores of those taking them tended to rise from year to year, as much as 15 points (one standard deviation) per generation. To maintain a mean score of 100 for the population on which IQ tests were standardised, test makers were forced to make their tests increasingly difficult over the years. In other words, to get the same IQ score as your father, you must perform equally well on a substantially tougher test than he took.
If, for whatever reason, everybody were getting smarter, this would be wonderful news indeed. But a glance at the numbers shows that something very curious must be going on here. If IQ were, in fact, rising at a rate of 15 points per generation then, if the mean IQ of today is 100, that of our grandparents’ generation would have been about 70–generally considered the threshold of mental retardation. Clearly, anybody who’s spent time with their grandparents and other folks of that generation knows that’s utter nonsense.
The literature and music of a century or more ago is clearly not the work of marginally retarded minds, and its abundance indicates those who wrote it were not rare exceptions in a generally dull population. Consider genius in the past. Most people considered geniuses have IQs in the vicinity of 150, or 3 1/3 standard deviations above the mean IQ of 100. In a population with a mean IQ of 100, individuals with IQs of 150 occur with a frequency of about one in 2300 people–they’re rare, but every medium-sized town has one or more, and even a small country with a population of one million has more than 425 such geniuses.
Now, in a population with a mean IQ of 70, which naïve interpretation of the Flynn effect would deem our grandparents to have had, genius-level IQs of 150 would be 5 1/3 standard deviations above the mean and occur, on average, in only one out of 20,396,324 people. If we take the Flynn effect as 3 IQ points per decade, then we’d expect a mean IQ of 70 around the year 1900. In 1900, the world population was about 1.7 thousand million, which would imply there were only 80 people with genius-level IQs in the entire world of 1900. The merest glance at the history of that era will reveal how ridiculous a supposition this is.
Adults, whatever their opinion may be of “what’s the matter with kids today”, are most unlikely to cite “they’re just too doggone smart!” So, the Flynn effect is a conundrum: a wide variety of tests which agree with one another and reliably predict outcomes we identify with “intelligence” all indicate that the general population is becoming more intelligent at an almost dizzying rate, while other evidence for this (for example, individuals with Einstein-calibre intelligence being almost 10,000 times more common than a hundred years ago) is notably absent. There is no shortage of hypotheses for what’s going on, but little evidence to support any of them. Flynn himself believes that IQ tests measure test-taking and problem-solving ability, not genuine intelligence, and that this has risen over time as more and more children receive compulsory education and are subjected to ever more tests. Improved nutrition over the 20th century is often cited as a factor, as well as the introduction of egalitarian welfare state systems in developed countries tending to reduce poverty. But all of these are factors which one would expect to eventually reach a plateau, and that doesn’t seem to have happened, at least so far.
This isn’t a document about the Flynn effect (although it risks becoming one unless I wind this up rather soon), and since no solution to this long-standing puzzle is at hand, one can only speculate on what it really means. Since correction for the Flynn effect is substantial in Lynn and Vanhanen’s national IQ estimates, and can be expected to strongly influence IQ scores published in the future, it is essential one bear it in mind in any analysis of population intelligence trends.
- IQ scores are normalised for a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15 in the populations for which they were originally developed. Is the standard deviation the same in populations with higher or lower mean IQ?
- I don’t know. This is a fascinating question about which I have found no research whatsoever. Absent any information to the contrary, in computing the global IQ histogram in the charts at the top of this document, I assume a standard deviation of 15 points regardless of the mean. Note that this assumption only affects the shape of the histogram; the global mean is independent of the variance of individual country populations.
References
Data Sources for this Page
- Lynn, Richard and Tatu Vanhanen.
IQ and the Wealth of Nations.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
ISBN 0-275-97510-X.
- Lynn, Richard and Tatu Vanhanen.
“Intelligence and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations“.
2000-2002.
- U.S. Census Bureau.
International Data Base 2003.
- U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
The World Factbook 2003.
IQ Phenomenology: The Flynn Effect
- Neisser, Ulric, ed.
The Rising Curve: Long-Term Gains in IQ and Related Measures.
Washington: American Psychological Association, 1998.
ISBN 1-55798-503-0.
- Flynn, J. R.
“The Mean IQ of Americans: Massive gains 1932 to 1978”,
Psychological Bull. 95, 29 (1984).
- Flynn, J. R.
“Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: What IQ tests really measure”,
Psychological Bull. 101, 171 (1987).
- Flynn, J. R.
“IQ gains over time”, in Sternberg, Robert J.. ed.
Encyclopedia of Human Intelligence.
New York: Macmillan, 1994.
ISBN 0-028-97407-7.
(pp. 617-623)
“IQ Exists and Matters” Arguments
- Herrnstein, Richard J. and Charles Murray.
The Bell Curve.
New York: The Free Press, [1994] 1996.
ISBN 0-684-82429-9.
- Jensen, Arthur R.
The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.
ISBN 0-275-96103-6.
- Rushton, J. Philippe.
“Race, Intelligence, and the Brain: The Errors and Omissions of the `Revised’ Edition of S. J. Gould’s
The Mismeasure of Man (1996)“,
Person. individ. Diff. 23, 169 (1997).
“IQ Doesn’t Exist and/or Matter” Arguments
- Gould, Stephen Jay.
The Mismeasure of Man.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
ISBN 0-393-31425-1.
- Devlin, Bernie et al., eds.
Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve.
New York: Copernicus, 1997.
ISBN 0-387-94986-0.
- Fraser, Steven.
The Bell Curve Wars.
New York: Basic Books, 1995.
ISBN 0-465-00693-0.
Economic Development and Population Trends
- Todd, Emmanuel.
Après l’Empire.
Paris: Gallimard, 2002.
ISBN 2-07-076710-8.
English translation:
After the Empire.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
ISBN 0-231-13102-X.
