My overview of psychometrics

I used these slides in two talks given at Foo Camp 2010 and Sci Foo 2010. At these "self-organized" meetings attendees are encouraged to talk about whatever they find interesting, and I usually choose to talk about wacky stuff rather than my main research, which tends to be a bit too specialized for the audience. In previous years I've talked about ultimate fighting, internet security, startups, etc.

At Foo, which has a Silicon Valley flavor, I had several CEOs and a bunch of technologists in the audience, and didn't receive any objections to the material. One CEO (an IIT grad with a PhD in engineering from Princeton) who runs a software company employing 1000 developers in India, was very interested in my results and has since agreed to run some experiments (stay tuned!) related to personnel selection and the relation between g and coding ability. At Sci Foo, which has a more scientific or academic flavor, the audience consisted of science writers, Google engineers, physical and computer scientists, a neuroscientist, and (I think) a social scientist. Only the last two voiced objections -- the social scientist actually got up and walked out after 15 minutes. Others in the audience found these objections rather amusing -- How could they argue? All you did was show data; the conclusions are obvious!

See additional comments (elaboration from the talks) here.