Technology spins on

Pacman's not dead. He's just living with Elvis. VR has always been a dream for computer users, programmers and gamers. But "Mixed Reality" might be the way that we see things evolve for awhile. The advent of this ability to superimpose computer data onto real world data is striking. The Pacman game seems an almost trivial and juvenile use of a technology so powerful.

Imagine SWAT team members equipped with light, unobtrusive goggles that could screen out the flash from a flashbang and could superimpose maps of buildings based on GPS location. What about being able to walk around with glasses that had a small HUD that reported everything from your current health status to the identity of someone you were looking at. Drivers would probably love to be able to display a small map in their field of vision so that they could find their way home in a strange city. There are probably many, many more applications for this technology. Thank goodness the Japanese have chosen to invest in Pacman ;)

In other techie news, it appears that the brain is still evolving, the interesting part of the story actually occurs at the very end, however. There is a very " Bell-Curve" like discovery that is made and, if true, it's going to cause us to rethink alot of our opinions regarding race, equity and fairness. Essentially, this group of scientists claims to have identified two genetic markers that correlate, roughly, to brain size. These markers came into being between 60,000 - 10,000 years ago (for one) and 500 - 14,000 years ago (for the other). At the end of the article they note that sub-Saharan African populations today. They are very careful to state that Intelligence is influenced by a number of unrelated factors and that these genes are only a small part in determining intelligence.

The problem is that they can't pick and choose what the data means. Either the genes are important enough that they propugated quickly and helped to create literature and the arts. Or they're not important and we shouldn't bother to even look at these findings. There isn't a politically correct middle ground here. The Bell Curve was an incredibly controversial and, some would say, racist book. It posited the idea that blacks were, as a group, naturally less intelligent then whites. I will not even begin to opine on what I think of that idea.

However, there is one piece of information that has never been properly explained, that is that Blacks students with equivalent demographic data (family status and income being the two most common) are outperformed by white students on standardized tests. Once all the factors are controlled for the margin is fairly slim (family status appears to be the key here as this comparison of 1995 SAT data vs. this 1994 study of other factors). It would be nice if someone could do the math to isolate family size and parental status to determine their relative statistical impact. However you slice it though blacks still have an unexplained performance gap as compared to whites.

This data could turn out to be that missing explanation. If there's a genetic marker that is prevelant across the vast majority of the world's populace but is statistically slightly less likely to occur in certain groups then it could explain a 10-20 point SAT gap. I'd like to believe that there's another explanation but if there's not then, given the ultra slim margins we're talking about, I can live with this one. I'd be fascinated to learn whether or not this marker appears more common in Scandinavian and Asian populations. If it does not then there's obviously something else at play. If it does appear more often in those two, historically high scoring, groups then it might be a fascinating and controversial discovery indeed.