Indian Americans: model minorities perhaps, but not necessarily a byproduct of anything inherent

In response to: Indian Americans: The New Model Minority

The way Richwine is arguing it has some very racist undertones. By comparing Indian Americans within a pool of just minorities, he's implying a difference between whites and everyone else that needs to be delineated; by buying into them being a "model minority," they're validating themselves by the gauge of White people. "It values communities -- and their right to be in the U.S. -- based on economic success. It suggests that only immigrants with college degrees or high IQs can contribute to society, when in reality, industriousness knows no boundaries" [1].

Furthermore, he's also using stereotypes and correlations to imply causation. The reason there are so many Indian doctors/engineers/

professionals might not be because they're naturally smarter. For example, a large proportion of Indian doctors in America now are here because they came here after leaving India. There was a mass expatriation during the second half of the 20th century that saw 10.1% of the 592,215 physicians registered by the Medical Council of India emigrate to the US, UK, Canada, and Australia [2]. As nice as it seems ostensibly to have such a high proportion of Indian doctors in the Western world, I think the skeleton in the closet is that they left India because it had sub-par residency training and practice positions. The same can be said of engineers who leave India because of its wretched working conditions. I think the Germans, for example, are equally intelligent and industrious; but they don't leave Germany in droves the way Indian professionals did. Even if they did, they wouldn't even be considered a minority because of the color of their skin.

Even Richwine admits his arguments are cursory, despite trying to present them as substantive evidence: "Given the small sample size, the rough IQ measure and the lack of corroborating data sets, this finding of lofty Indian-American intelligence must be taken cautiously. Nevertheless, it is entirely consistent with their observed achievement." He argues that, in contrast, Mexicans "are much less wealthy and educated than U.S. natives, even after many years in the country." This is unfortunately attributed to the Mexican culture as a whole and clearly shouldn't be. First, Mexican emigrants tend to be of the non-educated variety when they come here, looking for new opportunities that they can't get in Mexico. [sarcasm] Second, its not like structural racism, redlining, negative stereotypes and media portrayal (impacting employment), etc. hinder their successes at all [/sarcasm].

At best, this is poor journalism and, at worst, a glimpse into the reason cultural divides still exist in modern society.

References:

1. http://www.theroot.com/views/nobodys-model-minority?gt1=38002
2. http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/353/17/1810

See also:

• http://blog.saalt.org/?p=206

Water-powered Jet Pack

This seriously looks so fun I want it to be warm out that much more now. I can't believe no one's thought of this before (the patent was from 2007, according to the article).

Indexed is one of my favorite "comics"

I use the term "comic" loosely as indexed is not what you'd typically think of when referring to one. If you can consider xkcd a comic (and I'm sure most people can), however, then I think indexed deserves just as much consideration for its humor; isn't that what makes a comic a comic, after all? Sure, the drawings in other popular comics such as Penny Arcade and Ctrl-Alt-Del allow them to create characters with which the readers can more closely sympathize, but that's their artistic prerogative. I think comics like xkcd, abstruse goose, and indexed convey their messages, however insightful or humorous they may be, equally well without the need for characters that are consistent across comics.

Today's comic hit especially close to home for personal reasons. In fact, its this type of attention to the ordinary and mundane that makes you step back and realize how overcomplicated we make things sometimes.

Sorry if that sounded really artsy.

Rails ActiveRecord validation

For something so simple, you'd think there'd be a decent amount of documentation out there for it, but you'd be wrong.

I was trying to write a validation on a model to ensure a certain condition was met, in this case that one object attribute was never larger than another for the same object before it was saved. Turns out it was as simple as this (sorry for the formatting, not sure how to post code snippets yet):

protected
_def validate
__errors.add_to_base('x cannot be greater than y') if self.x > self.y
_end

Apparently, Rails looks for a validate method and will call it during the validation process. No need for callbacks here (i.e. before_update, after_validation, etc.). The corresponding test is fairly easy to deduce:

it "should have not have more x than y" do
_@obj.y = 0
_@obj.x = 1
_@obj.should_not be_valid
end

From ESPN Page 2's the Sports Guy, Bill Simmons

The Todd Marinovich Award for "Worst performance by a rookie QB"
Put it this way, Matty Ice: When the Cards are jumping the snap for four quarters, then one of them goes on a radio show saying they jumped every snap count because you called every play on "one," then you probably should enroll in a "How to vary your snap counts" class at Steve DeBerg College this summer. Although I love the potential of a Boston College product not being able to count to two.

Yea, I realize this isn't a very good first post, but deal with it.