Intelligence, Gender and Race
General intelligence, its form and how it is distributed in various populations are among the topics covered in this conversation with Prodigy. A new kind of meta-analysis is unveiled, and with it an assessment of the cognitive gender gap. All this and more when La Griffe du Lion interviews a celebrated whiz kid. Volume 9, Number 1, January 2007

Politics, Imprisonment and Race
An adult black man is seven times as likely to be found housed behind bars as is his white counterpart. Paradoxically, the largest disparities are found in political domains controlled by liberals -- the leaders in the struggle for racial justice. By examining how criminal behavior is distributed within the races, the paradox is resolved showing it to be an unintended consequence of liberal benevolence and goodwill. Volume 8, Number 1, April 2006

Sex Differences in Mathematical Aptitude
Mathematics is a man's game. A gender gap appears early in life, blossoms with the onset of puberty and reaches full bloom by mid-adolescence. It indelibly shapes women's prospects for doing significant mathematics. In this account of cognitive sex differences, Prodigy shows how sex-differentiated ability in 15 year-olds accounts for the exiguous female representation at the highest levels of mathematical research. A female Fields Medalist is predicted to surface once every 103 years. Volume 7, Number 2, July 2005

Cognitive Decline: The Irreducible Legacy of Open Borders
Cognitive decline, the result of third world immigration, differential fecundity and gene flow, will mark the end of Western ascendancy. Described herein is the path to collapse and the improbable circumstances surrounding its discovery.  Volume 7, Number 1, January 2005

Smart Fraction Theory II: Why Asians Lag
Deeply gratified by Mentor's interest in smart fraction theory, and mindful of his appreciation of its good fit to observation, Prodigy offers a refinement to the theory that, notwithstanding the success of the original, should forever alter the way in which national wealth and IQ are perceived.  Volume 6, Number 2, May 2004

Closing the Racial Learning Gap
An analysis of learning-gap dynamics: Wherein conflicting evidence is reconciled; a recipe for becoming America's most celebrated education administrator is proposed; and Prodigy comes of age.  Volume 6, Number 1, January 2004

Assessing the Ashkenazic IQ
Prodigy presents a lecture to the Brotherhood of Temple Emanuel at its weekly Sunday morning brunch. Therein he develops a new estimate of the Ashkenazic IQ, tracing Ashkenazic achievement back to its cognitive underpinnings. Both general and mathematical IQ are assessed. The analysis takes into account the fat tail character of IQ distributions.  Volume 5, Number 2, September 2003

How to Optimize Productivity with a Multiracial Workforce: The Theory of Differential Cutoff
The casual reader, inclined toward meritocratic ideals, may be put off by what follows, wherein a hypothetical wager between two college presidents evolves into a method for optimizing productivity. But be assured that the procedure developed herein adheres strictly to the principles our reader holds dear.  Volume 5, Number 1, February 2003

The Effect of Urban Flight on IQ Distribution
A violation of the fundamental law of sociology is unearthed, pointing the way to an appraisal of inner-city and suburban IQs, and the characterization of cognitive discontinuities caused by urban migratory patterns.  Volume 4, Number 2, August 2002

The Smart Fraction Theory of IQ and the Wealth of Nations
Prodigy and Mentor propose a theory to explain newly published data relating national IQ to economic development. The theory predicts sigmoid dependence of per capita GDP on mean national IQ.   Volume 4, Number 1, March 2002

Dogs, Runners and the Distribution of Human Attributes
With the beauty of Piemontese ladies still fresh upon his memory, whatever good intentions La Griffe might have entertained when he sat down at the keyboard to chronicle therewith the results of his recent musings, his attention was quickly diverted by thoughts of Piemonte in October, of white truffles in Alba and of the hounds that unearth them. From this improbable fusion of reverie and analysis emerged this account of biodiversity among dogs, runners and the tribes from whence they spring. Considered are such diverse questions as how gender differences in aggressiveness compare in men and dogs, and whether a European can ever again win an Olympic medal in distances over 1500m.  Volume 3, Number 5, October 2001

Pearbotham's Law
Amidst a backdrop of legal nuance, where high-stakes testing, adverse impact and mathematical artifact intertwine, Prodigy receives a lesson in race and jurisprudence.   Volume 3, Number 4, July 2001

Racial Disparities in School Discipline
There are among us persons of so refined and delicate a nature that they cannot bear the guilt even of crimes they have not committed. Their shame is so great that they turn their considerable talents to serve the demagogues of bias. In this essay we analyze their efforts to document racial discrimination in school discipline, and humbly offer advice on how to improve their methods.   Volume 3, Number 3, June 2001

Diversity and Excellence: Are They Compatible?
In 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court declared that racially segregated schools were inherently unequal. The Court based its decision on studies showing that "segregated schools damaged the psyches of black children and their motivation to learn." But do black students really achieve more in racially mixed classrooms? And what of whites? In this essay we examine how racial diversity affects achievement. Along the way we find and resolve a puzzling anomaly.   Volume 3, Number 2, March 2001

The Case of the Uncounted Ballots
In the days following the 2000 presidential election in Florida, million of words were written to analyze the result, but few were necessary. In this issue, Prodigy chronicles a remarkable visit to his friend and mentor, wherein Mentor evaluates the minimum IQ needed to cast a proper ballot for every voting system used in Florida. From these, the true winner is revealed, as is the margin of victory.   Volume 3, Number 1, January 2001

Aggressiveness, Criminality and Sex Drive by Race, Gender and Ethnicity
Certain human qualities share with each other the property of fuzziness. We call them fuzzy variables. Their meaning, though clear by standards of ordinary language, lack predictive precision. To make them quantitative, we introduce a technique we call the method of thresholds. With it, we compare aggressiveness, criminality and sex drive by race, gender and ethnicity.   Volume 2, Number 11, December 2000

The Color of Death Row  
For those who desire a dispassionate view of death-row justice, let them know that no axe will be ground here, and lest there be any well-intentioned persons who do not perceive the difference between polemic and analysis, style and substance, pomposity and eloquence, let them know that it is always the latter to which we aspire, never the former. For those who endure the stringency of this essay, let them also know they will discover that justice depends on geography, that much of America is fair, and that bias on death row affects mostly whites.  Volume 2, Number 10, October 2000

The Politics of Mental Retardation: A Tail of the Bell Curve  
Political movements have victims, and the cause of diversity is no exception. Whites, Asians and males are all casualties of the diversicrat, but his most deplorable incivility makes victims of the hapless.  If anyone should deny the politicization of mental retardation, let him confront the data presented herein.  Volume 2, Number 9, September 2000

IQ Matters  Prodigy and his friend Jesse join Mentor to discuss Prodigy's approaching college choice. Together they solve the mystery of how an otherwise unremarkable college managed to produce eight Nobel Prize winners in 21 years. Prodigy and Jesse come up with novel estimates of the Ashkenazic Jewish IQ.  Volume 2, Number 8, August 2000

Educating a Black Elite  Thousands of  blacks in the US have IQ scores above 130, many more above 120. A war is raging over who will hire them and who will educate them. In the corporate board room where the bottom line rules and fear of litigation lurks around every corner, the need to diversify is overriding. It is a cost of doing business. But nowhere is diversity more alive than on the college campus. University faculty are true believers. Diversity on campus is like God at a revival meeting. Academics recruit minorities with the passion of evangelists, but diversity does not come easy. Industry and universities face the same obstacle: the appalling lack of minority talent. In this essay we examine how one university deals with this issue. Volume 2, Number 7, July 2000

The Death of Meritocracy  The noise has subsided, and with passions contained we look back at Prop 209 and Hopwood. Our goal: to check for compliance with the law. To help, we developed tests capable of exposing violations in exquisite detail. But when we saw admissions data from the medical schools of the University of California and the Law School at the University of Texas, we found noncompliance so blatant that simple inspection revealed it. Butchering a steer with a scalpel, however, does have its moments. Under Prop 209, the UCLA Medical School admitted 51 blacks and Hispanics in 1997. The chance of that occurring without the use of preferences was 1 in 10³⁶⁴. (There are about 10¹⁰⁰ fundamental particles in the universe.) Volume 2, Number 6, June 2000

Analysis of Hate Crime  Bias-motivated crime has unique characteristics. As in heterosexual rape, victims and offenders come from different groups. Unlike rape, however, hate crime is reciprocal. Each group can prey upon the other. Though not obvious, these singular aspects incline the data in a unique way. The sizes of victim and offender groups influence victimization rates in a way that is often more significant than intrinsic group bias. Methods are developed for interpreting  hate-crime statistics. They are applied to recent FBI data. Volume 2, Number 5, May 2000

2048  An eleven-year-old prodigy peers into the future, looking at the condition of racial and ethnic polarization at mid-century. From the single assumption that earning ability is distributed differently among racial and ethnic groups, Prodigy develops a formalism to describe intergroup polarization. From this analysis a pair of limiting laws emerge: Prodigy's Laws I and II. Volume 2, Number 4, April 2000

Standardized Tests: The Interpretation of Racial and Ethnic Gaps  The interpretation of standardized test scores is full of traps that news media, politicians and interested citizens commonly fall into. Racial and ethnic gaps, and particularly their trends, are not always what they seem. A perceived gap decrease can really be an increase, and vice versa. In this essay we show how to make sense of test-score data.  Examples are taken from Maryland (MSPAP) and Texas (TAAS) statewide exams, the bar exam and the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) Exam Part I. A coherent pattern emerges. Volume 2, Number 3, March 2000

Some Thoughts about Jews, IQ and Nobel Laureates  A dialogue between an eleven-year-old prodigy and his mentor leads to a conjecture on the achievements of Ashkenazic Jews, and an estimate of the mean IQ of the Nobel laureates.  Volume 2, Number 2, February 2000

Black Athletes: Can Whites Measure Up?  One of the under-celebrated sagas of human biodiversity in the last quarter of the twentieth century is the emergence of the black athlete. His primacy is so conspicuous in some sports, that at the highest levels of competition other racial groups are all but invisible. In this essay, La Griffe du Lion analyzes the black-white athletic ability gap and shows how to measure it. We introduce the notion of an athletic quotient or AQ, and estimate black-white AQ gaps. Methods are developed to show how AQ can be used to make predictions ranging from the most probable racial makeup of a high-school basketball team to the probability that a randomly selected white can run faster than a randomly selected black.  Volume 2, Number 1, January 2000

Affirmative Action: The Robin Hood Effect.  In this essay La Griffe du Lion models the effect of affirmative action on the income of whites, blacks and Hispanics. It is shown that on average a black worker, between the ages of 25 and 64, earns an extra $9,400 a year because of affirmative action. Hispanics also benefit to the tune of almost $4,000 a year. However, being a zero-sum game, white workers pay an average of about $1,900 annually to foot the bill.  Volume 1, Number 4, December 1999

Crime in the Hood.  Violent victimization of whites by blacks is modeled in a racially mixed inner-city neighborhood. Its evolution is traced from the first black to move in, to the last white who moves out. The probability of a white being violently attacked is developed as a function of a neighborhood’s racial composition. It is shown to increase nonlinearly, approaching unity as a neighborhood becomes predominately black.  Volume 1, Number 3, November 1999

The Color of Meritocracy.  In a society based on meritocratic principles, a pattern of color will emerge that reflects the distribution of human attributes among racial and ethnic groups. Such patterns have developed in America in professional sports. In other areas, however, we have been more circumspect. In this essay, La Griffe takes a mostly dispassionate look at how to calculate, by race and ethnicity, the outcome of any competition in which group abilities differ. We focus on cognitive differences, saving other group variations for later consideration. Depending on where in the culture wars you stand, the method can be used to test claims of equity or inequity. Illustrations are provided that range from the promotion of police officers to law school admissions.  Volume 1, Number 2, October 1999

Women and Minorities in Science.  Prospects for women and minority doctoral scientists in engineering and other math-intensive areas are examined. A calculation of the ethnic-gender profile of this segment of the workforce is made for U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Rank ordering on mathematical reasoning ability predicts that women will top off at approximately 27 percent of this market. Similarly, rank ordering predicts almost 99 percent of math-intensive doctoral jobs will go to whites and Asians of primarily Chinese, Japanese, Korean and South Asian descent. Asians will continue to be represented in these fields well beyond their numbers in the general population. A study of the math-intensive academic marketplace predicts that women will top off there at about 22 to 23 percent. Volume 1, Number 1, September 1999