Christine Ma

Michael Schapira

"Herrnstein & Murray's The Bell Curve is a deeply controversial text that raises serious issues about the stakes involved in reasoning and interpretation. The authors' central contention is that intelligence is the primary factor determining social outcomes for individuals--and that it is a better predictor of achievement than income, background or socioeconomic status. One of the major issues raised by the book was its discussion of 'racial differences in intelligence, ' and its contention that there is a link between the low observed test scores and social outcomes for African-Americans and their lack of social attainment. While the authors produce and interpret a great deal of data to back up their contentions, they ultimately fail to tackle the problem that neither 'intelligence' nor 'race' have widely accepted definitions in biology, anthropology or sociology. In consequence, the book it has been termed both 'racis©t'; and 'pseudoscientifi©c'; thanks to what its critics see as both its faulty reasoning and its uncautious interpretation of evidence. The debate continues to this day, with academics on both sides engaged in fierce arguments over what can be argued from the data that Herrnstein and Murray used."--Provided by publisher.

Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

An Analysis of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve

Herrnstein & Murray's The Bell Curve is a deeply controversial text that raises serious issues about the stakes involved in reasoning and interpretation. The authors’ central contention is that intelligence is the primary factor determining social outcomes for individuals – and that it is a better predictor of achievement than income, background or socioeconomic status. One of the major issues raised by the book was its discussion of 'racial differences in intelligence,' and its contention that there is a link between the low observed test scores and social outcomes for African-Americans and their lack of social attainment. While the authors produce and interpret a great deal of data to back up their contentions, they ultimately fail to tackle the problem that neither 'intelligence' nor 'race' have widely accepted definitions in biology, anthropology or sociology. In consequence, the book has been termed both ‘racist’ and ‘pseudoscientific’ thanks to what its critics see as both its faulty reasoning and its uncautious interpretation of evidence. The debate continues to this day, with academics on both sides engaged in fierce arguments over what can be argued from the data that Herrnstein and Murray used.

The Bell Curve

IBM Redbooks

Mike Ebbers

Dino Tonelli

Jason Arnold

Patric Becker

Yuan-Chi Chang

Willie Favero

Shantan Kethireddy

Nin Lei

Shirley Lin

Ron Lounsbury

Susan Widing Lynch

Cristian Molaro

Deepak Rangarao

As business cycles speed up, many customers gain significant competitive advantage from quicker and more accurate business decision-making by using real data. For many customers, choosing the path to co-locate their transactional and analytical workloads on System z® better leverages their existing investment in hardware, software, and skills. We created a project to address a number of best practice questions on how to manage these newer, analytical type workloads, especially when co-located with traditional transactional workloads. The goal of this IBM® Redbooks® publication is to provide technical guidance and performance trade-offs associated with resource management and potentially DB2® data-sharing in a variety of mixed transactional / data warehouse System z topologies. The term co-location used here and in the rest of the book is specifically defined as the practice of housing both transactional (OLTP) and data warehouse (analytical) workloads within the same System z configuration. We also assumed that key portions of the transactional and data warehouse databases would reside on DB2 for z/OS®. The databases may or may not reside in a DB2 data-sharing environment; we discuss those pros and cons in this book. The intended audience includes DB2 data warehouse architects and practitioners who are facing choices in resource management and system topologies in the data warehouse arena. This specifically includes Business Intelligence (BI) administrators, DB2 database administrators (DBAs) and z/OS performance administrators / systems programmers. In addition, decision makers and architects can utilize this book to assist in making platform and database topology decisions. The book is divided into four parts. Part I, "Introducing the co-location project" covers the System z value proposition and why one should consider System z as the central platform for their data warehousing / business analytics needs. Some topics are risk avoidance via data consolidation, continuous availability, simplified disaster recovery, IBM Smart Analytics Optimizer, reduced network bandwidth requirements, and the unique virtualization and resource management capabilities of System z LPAR, z/VM® and WLM. Part I also provides some of the common System z co-location topologies along with an explanation of the general pros and cons of each. This would be useful input for an architect to understand where a customer is today and where they might consider moving to. Part II, "Project environment" covers the environment, products, workloads, workload drivers, and data models implemented for this study. The environment consisted of a logically partitioned z10TM 32way, running z/VM, Linux®, and z/OS operating system instances. On those instances we ran products such as z/OS DB2 V9, IBM Cognos® Business Intelligence Version 8.4 for Linux on System z, InfoSphereTM Warehouse for System z, InfoSphere Change Data Capture, z/OS WebSphere® V7, Tivoli® Omegamon for DB2 Performance expert. Utilizing these products we created transactional (OLTP), data warehouse query, and data warehouse refresh workloads. All the workloads were based on an existing web-based transactional Bookstore workload, that's currently utilized for internal testing within the System p® and z labs. While some IBM Cognos BI and ISWz product usage and experiences information is covered in this book, we do not go into the depth typically found in IBM Redbooks publications, since there's another book focused specifically on that

Co-locating Transactional and Data Warehouse Workloads on System z

Herrnstein & Murray's The Bell Curve is a deeply controversial text that raises serious issues about the stakes involved in reasoning and interpretation. The authors' central contention is that intelligence is the primary factor determining social outcomes for individuals - and that it is a better predictor of achievement than income, background or socioeconomic status. One of the major issues raised by the book was its discussion of 'racial differences in intelligence,' and its contention that there is a link between the low observed test scores and social outcomes for African-Americans and their lack of social attainment. While the authors produce and interpret a great deal of data to back up their contentions, they ultimately fail to tackle the problem that neither 'intelligence' nor 'race' have widely accepted definitions in biology, anthropology or sociology. In consequence, the book has been termed both 'racist' and 'pseudoscientific' thanks to what its critics see as both its faulty reasoning and its uncautious interpretation of evidence. The debate continues to this day, with academics on both sides engaged in fierce arguments over what can be argued from the data that Herrnstein and Murray used.

Michael Schapira

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