Standardized exams measure intrinsic ability, not racial or socioeconomic privilege
Recently, the usage of standardized testing has fallen under deep scrutiny in America. […] I outline a clear, step-by-step argument that lays out a strong case for the pro-standardized testing viewpoint. […] Upon a comprehensive review of the literature, I find that cognitive ability is a coherent, innate, and heritable trait; that standardized exams are good measures of cognitive ability, and are largely unaffected by parental income or education; finally, that exam scores are not meaningfully affected by student preparation, motivation, educational quality, or parental pressure, and certainly not to a degree necessary to explain group differences in performance.
Translation of 水平社宣言 (Proclamation from the Buraku Liberation League) from 1933
This is an amateur (practice) translation of 水平社宣言 (Proclamation from the Buraku Liberation League), a statement issued by the 全国水平社 (National Buraku Liberation League) in the year 1933. It calls for solidarity and pride among the Burakumin, an ethnic subpopulation descended from a low-status pre-Meiji caste which was (and remains) the subject of discrimination and prejudice in Japan.
Recipe for olive oil cake with osmanthus blossom syrup
This is a recipe for olive oil cake with osmanthus blossom syrup. It fits in a loaf pan.
Translation of 新しい元号「令和」について (Regarding the Name of the New Imperial Era, “Reiwa”)
This is an amateur (practice) translation of an official communication from the office of the Japanese Prime Minister commenting upon the origin of the name of the new imperial era, “Reiwa.” The source text is given in 新しい元号「令和」について.
Translation of 告全党全军全国各族人民书 (Notice to the Entire Party, Entire Army, Entire Country, and All Ethnic Groups) on the death of Deng Xiaoping in 1997
This is an amateur translation of 告全党全军全国各族人民书, “Notice to the Entire Party, Entire Army, Entire Country, and All Ethnic Groups,” published in 1997 in the People’s Republic of China by the Central Committee of the CCP (中国共产党中央委员会). This notice announces the death of Deng Xiaoping.
Exercise 1.6 from Stein and Shakarchi’s Fourier Analysis
The problem is as follows: Prove that if 
is a twice continuously differentiable function on 
which is a solution of the equation 
, then there exist constants 
and 
such that 
.
Estimated IQ distribution of children given IQ of parents
Let’s try to estimate the distribution of the “genetic IQ” of some offspring assuming that we know the parental “genetic IQ.”
しまなみ海道を狙っている者へのアドバイス
しまなみ海道をサイクリングについていくつかの重点があります。初心者にしたらしまなみ海道の難度に適性があり反面、旅行を立案時に不明な点が時々現れます。僕の個人的な経験にすぎないでもいくつかのアドバイスを紹介します。
New York’s subway construction is strangled by government bloat
It has become increasingly well appreciated lately that “America can’t build.” More accurately, modern America seems to be incapable of building large infrastructure in anything resembling a timely, cost-effective manner, leaving us handily outdone by obscure North African countries. The prevailing diagnoses much resemble the crumbling decrepitude of human aging: the cost overruns appear to arise from a multitude of disparate inefficiencies rather than from any one key failing. I argue, however, that a new case study on the failures of New York’s Second Avenue Subway extension from the Transit Costs Project well illustrates how government bloat writ large is a unifying lens through which America’s construction inefficiencies can be productively analyzed. This analysis, in turn, helps us concretely imagine what a model of effective-but-small governance would look like.
Localizations of a ring at maximal ideals correspond to stalks of a sheaf
We have previously observed that localizing a finitely generated algebra at a specific element yields a local ring which is exactly the set of regular functions on the distinguished open set 
, or in other words, the sections of the sheaf of regular functions on . That is to sayーwe have the concept of a (pre)sheaf 
, which ‘collects together’ regular functions that are defined on the open sets of a topological space 
, and we have shown that if we look at the functions that are assigned to special types of open sets (distinguished open sets ), they correspond to the localizations of a finitely generated algebra 
at specific elements of that algebra. (Notably, this means they have global representations as polynomial quotients over each .) However, what happens if we want to look at the behavior of these functionsーsections of the sheaf ーnear a specific point in the topological space?