William Shockley

This didn’t make it to the online version of the Stanford Daily:
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“May 2, 1972: Shockley Denied Approval for Grad Genetics Course
Professor William Shockley was refused university approval yesterday to teach a graduate special course on his research into ‘dysgenics,’ the study of worsening genetic qualities… [dean of the graduate school Lincoln] Moses’ letter to Shockley, a Nobel prizewinner for co-invention of the transistor, stated, ‘your expertise for teaching this course is subject to doubt.’ The 62-year-old physicist responded yesterday that ‘this is so in keeping with… the unwillingness of the intellectual community to appraise things objectively and dispassionately.’ Shockley added that the threat to academic freedom was ‘trivial’ compared to the administration’s illusion that all races of mankind are genetically equal. He describes this is ‘the illusion of flat human quality.’
Shockley’s proposed course, on new methods of research dealing with ‘the determination of the Caucasian fraction of the ancestry of the American Negro populations,’ the ‘geneticity of IQ,’ and the relation between I.Q. and personality traits, took the five-member faculty committee three months to review.” – compiled by Kelley Fong

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Perhaps he should have tried the GSB, which I recall reading has a ’1-year-rule’: any faculty can teach a course on any topic of their choice for one year, after which it comes under administrative review. See the new book on his life, Broken Genius. Tenure continues to have its benefits and its drawbacks – such as this emeritus Stanford professor’s tirade against Iranian students – which the numerous Persian students here have tried, and failed, to do anything about.

Blind to Error

It’s World War II, and the military has a predicament: how to place armor on warplanes to minimize losses. All they have to work with are the bullet holes observed in planes returning from missions – and their recommendation is to put the armor where the planes have been hit. Right?

Wrong. Statistician Abraham Wald realizes selection bias in the sample when he sees it – specifically survivorship bias. The planes they’re looking at are all the ones that returned safely – therefore the hits they received were non-lethal and do not need protection. Wald instead mandated that the armor cover the areas of the planes not hit.

After finding mention of this in a stats book, I looked for his paper, “A Method of Estimating Plane Vulnerability Based on Damage of Survivors” which wasn’t available online, so I’ve uploaded the PDF of the paper kindly provided to me by Mr. Clarence Frazier of the Center for Naval Anslyses, Department of the Navy.

Graduation

A girl outside the Stanford stadium was passing these out:

an engineer would never have made such ambiguous arrows: