Datasets:
PaulPauls
/
openwebtext-sentences

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
2
text
stringlengths
1
100k
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – A nationwide warrant has been issued for a Minnesota couple who allegedly received more than $167,000 worth of public assistance from Minnesota while living in Florida on a $1.2 million yacht.
“I’ve never ridden on a yacht that nice, and I bet most of us haven’t, but they were living on it while they were collecting public assistance,” said Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman.
Colin Chisholm III and Andrea Chisholm are charged with a one count of wrongfully obtaining public assistance more than $35,000, a felony charge.
According to Hennepin County Attorney’s office, between Jan. 1, 2005, and May 31, 2012, Colin Chisholm III, 62, and Andrea Chisholm, 54, received the public assistance illegally from several government programs designed to help the poor.
According to the criminal complaints, over the years, the Chisholms received medical assistance, welfare payments and food stamp benefits.
They also lied about where they were living, who they were living with and their source of income on more than a dozen forms they filled out for the state of Minnesota and Hennepin County in order to get the assistance.
During an investigation by the Hennepin County Human Services & Public Health Department (HSPHD) Fraud Unit, it was discovered that Colin Chisholm owned a business and Andrea Chisholm owned a dog kennel which bred and sold championship dogs.
The criminal complaints show that hundreds of thousands of dollars came through the business accounts Colin Chisholm III controlled as chief executive officer of the TCN Network, which claims to provide satellite TV and broadband service for countries in the Caribbean.
“He created all sorts of false companies, claimed he was a Scottish heir,” Freeman said.
“It’s outrageous.” When they first applied for welfare benefits, the couple listed their residence as Andrea’s mother’s home in Minneapolis.
However, shortly after getting approved, they moved to Florida.
They remained in that state for at least 28 months, first on their $1.2 million yacht, and then moving to a house, officials said.
They collected welfare from Florida, as well as Minnesota during that time, which people are prohibited from receiving simultaneously.
Furthermore, in depositions for a civil suit over the ownership of the yacht, Colin and Andrea testified that they lived in Connecticut and Florida, and never mentioned Minnesota.
During this time, neither the yacht or residences in Florida were reported to Minnesota officials.
In 2006 and January 2007, Andrea’s prenatal care was paid for by the state and their welfare benefits increased.
According to the Hennepin County Attorney’s office, the Chisholms returned to Minnesota in April 2007 and applied for more welfare benefits.
The couple continued to receive assistance when they moved into a luxury home in Deephaven, Minn., with Andrea’s grandparents, Eloise and Francis Heidecker, in March 2008.
They moved into another home in Deephaven on Lake Minnetonka after being evicted from the first home when Francis died, officials said.
During this time, the Chisholms hid the fact that they lived with Eloise Heidecker, as Andrea controlled the bank accounts of her elderly grandmother.
“It astonishes me, I had no idea this could ever really happen,” said Calleigh King, a neighbor of the Chisholms.
“They’ve just been the kindest people ever.” After the HSPHD fraud unit received a report that the Chisholms were employed and they failed to provide tax documents when asked, Hennepin County terminated all welfare benefits to the Chisholms at the end of March 2012.
Medical assistance was cut off at the end of May 2012.
“It is truly outrageous when persons of considerable means steal from the government and all of us taxpayers through abusing the social welfare system,” Freeman said.
Prosecutors will ask that the judge be allowed to impose a longer sentence than the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines call for because the Chisholms committed a major economic offense.
The connection between race and intelligence has been a subject of debate in both popular science and academic research since the inception of IQ testing in the early 20th century.
There remains some debate as to whether and to what extent differences in intelligence test scores reflect environmental factors as opposed to genetic ones, as well as to the definitions of what "race" and "intelligence" are, and whether they can be objectively defined.
Currently, there is no non-circumstantial evidence that these differences in test scores have a genetic component, although some researchers believe that the existing circumstantial evidence makes it at least plausible that hard evidence for a genetic component will eventually be found.
The first test showing differences in IQ test results between different population groups in the US was the tests of United States Army recruits in World War I.
In the 1920s groups of eugenics lobbyists argued that this demonstrated that African-Americans and certain immigrant groups were of inferior intellect to Anglo-Saxon whites due to innate biological differences, using this as an argument for policies of racial segregation.
Soon, other studies appeared, contesting these conclusions and arguing instead that the Army tests had not adequately controlled for the environmental factors such as socio-economic and educational inequality between blacks and whites.
The debate reemerged again in 1969, when Arthur Jensen championed the view that for genetic reasons Africans were less intelligent than whites and that compensatory education for African-American children was therefore doomed to be ineffective.
In 1994, the book The Bell Curve argued that social inequality in the United States could largely be explained as a result of IQ differences between races and individuals, and rekindled the public and scholarly debate with renewed force.
During the debates following the book's publication, the American Anthropological Association and the American Psychological Association (APA) published official statements regarding the issue, both highly skeptical of some of the book's claims, although the APA report called for more empirical research on the issue.
History of the debate Claims of races having different intelligence were used to justify colonialism, slavery, racism, social Darwinism, and racial eugenics.
Racial thinkers such as Arthur de Gobineau relied crucially on the assumption that black people were innately inferior to whites in developing their ideologies of white supremacy.
Even enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, believed blacks to be innately inferior to whites in physique and intellect.
Early IQ testing The first practical intelligence test was developed between 1905 and 1908 by Alfred Binet in France for school placement of children.
Binet warned that results from his test should not be assumed to measure innate intelligence or used to label individuals permanently.
Binet's test was translated into English and revised in 1916 by Lewis Terman (who introduced IQ scoring for the test results) and published under the name the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales.
As Terman's test was published, there was great concern in the United States about the abilities and skills of recent immigrants.
Different immigrant nationalities were sometimes thought to belong to different races, such as Slavs.
A different set of tests developed by Robert Yerkes were used to evaluate draftees for World War I, and researchers found that people from southern and eastern Europe scored lower than native-born Americans, that Americans from northern states had higher scores than Americans from southern states, and that black Americans scored lower than white Americans.
The results were widely publicized by a lobby of anti-immigration activists, including the New York patrician and conservationist Madison Grant, who considered the Nordic race to be superior, but under threat of immigration by inferior breeds.
In his influential work A Study of American Intelligence psychologist Carl Brigham used the results of the Army tests to argue for a stricter immigration policy, limiting immigration to countries considered to belong to the "nordic race".
In the 1920s, states like Virginia enacted eugenic laws, such as its 1924 Racial Integrity Act, which established the one-drop rule as law.
On the other hand, many scientists reacted to eugenicist claims linking abilities and moral character to racial or genetic ancestry.
They pointed to the contribution of environment to test results (such as speaking English as a second language).
By the mid-1930s, many United States psychologists adopted the view that environmental and cultural factors played a dominant role in IQ test results, among them Carl Brigham who repudiated his own previous arguments, on the grounds that he realized that the tests were not a measure of innate intelligence.
Discussion of the issue in the United States also influenced German Nazi claims of the "nordics" being a "master race", influenced by Grant's writings.
As the American public sentiment shifted against the Germans, claims of racial differences in intelligence increasingly came to be regarded as problematic.
[7] Anthropologists such as Franz Boas, and Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, did much to demonstrate the unscientific status of many of the claims about racial hierarchies of intelligence.
Nonetheless a powerful eugenics and segregation lobby funded largely by textile-magnate Wickliffe Draper, continued to publicize studies using intelligence studies as an argument for eugenics, segregation, and anti-immigration legislation.
The Jensenism debates As the de-segregation of the American South was begun in the 1950s the debate about black intelligence resurfaced.
Audrey Shuey, funded by Draper's Pioneer Fund, published a new analysis of Yerkes' tests, concluding that blacks really were of inferior intellect to whites.
This study was used by segregationists as an argument that it was to the advantage of black children to be educated separately from the superior white children.
In the 1960s, the debate was further revived when William Shockley publicly defended the argument that black children were innately unable to learn as well as white children.
Arthur Jensen stimulated scholarly discussion of the issue with his Harvard Educational Review article, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?
"[14] Jensen's article questioned remedial education for African-American children; he suggested their poor educational performance reflected an underlying genetic cause rather than lack of stimulation at home.
Jensen continued to publish on the issue until his death in 2012.
The Bell Curve debate Another revival of public debate followed the appearance of The Bell Curve (1994), a book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, who strongly emphasized the societal effects of low IQ (focusing in most chapters strictly on the non-Hispanic white population of the United States).
In 1994, a group of 52 researchers (mostly psychologists) signed an editorial statement "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" in response to the book.
The Bell Curve also led to a 1995 report from the American Psychological Association, "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns", acknowledging a difference between mean IQ scores of whites and blacks as well as the absence of any adequate explanation of it, either environmental or genetic.
The Bell Curve prompted the publication of several multiple-author books responding from a variety of points of view.
[17][18] They include The Bell Curve Debate (1995), Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (1996) and a second edition of The Mismeasure of Man (1996) by Stephen Jay Gould.
[18] Jensen's last book-length publication, The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability was published a few years later in 1998.
The review article "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability" by Rushton and Jensen was published in 2005.
The article was followed by a series of responses, some in support, some critical.
[7][20] Richard Nisbett, another psychologist who had also commented at the time, later included an amplified version of his critique as part of the book Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count (2009).
[21] Rushton and Jensen in 2010 made a point-by-point reply to this thereafter.
[22] A comprehensive review article on the issue was published in the journal American Psychologist in 2012.
Some of the authors proposing genetic explanations for group differences have received funding from the Pioneer Fund, which was headed by Rushton until his death in 2012.
[18][26] The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the Pioneer Fund as a hate group, citing the fund's history, its funding of race and intelligence research, and its connections with racist individuals.
Other researchers have criticized the Pioneer Fund for promoting scientific racism, eugenics and white supremacy.
[28][29][30] Validity of race and IQ Intelligence, IQ, g and IQ tests The concept of intelligence and the degree to which intelligence is measurable is a matter of debate.
While there is some consensus about how to define intelligence, it is not universally accepted that it is something that can be unequivocally measured by a single figure.
[31] A recurring criticism is that different societies value and promote different kinds of skills and that the concept of intelligence is therefore culturally variable and cannot be measured by the same criteria in different societies.
[31] Consequently, some critics argue that proposed relationships to other variables are necessarily tentative.
[32] In relation to the study of racial differences in IQ test scores it becomes a crucial question what exactly it is that IQ tests measure.
Arthur Jensen was a proponent of the view that there is a correlation between scores on all the known types of IQ tests and that this correlation points to an underlying factor of general intelligence, or g. In most conceptions of g it is considered to be fairly fixed in a given individual and unresponsive to training or other environmental influences.
In this view test score differences, especially in those tasks considered to be particularly "g-loaded" reflect the test takers innate capability.
Other psychometricians argue that, while there may or may not be a general intelligence factor, performance on tests rely crucially on knowledge acquired through prior exposure to the types of tasks that such tests contain.
This view would mean that tests cannot be expected to reflect only the innate abilities of a given individual, because the expression of potential will always be mediated by experience and cognitive habits.
It also means that comparison of test scores from persons with widely different life experiences and cognitive habits is not an expression of their relative innate potentials.
Race The majority of anthropologists today consider race to be a sociopolitical phenomenon rather than a biological one, a view supported by considerable genetics research.
[36] The current mainstream view in the social sciences and biology is that race is a social construction based on folk ideologies that construct groups based on social disparities and superficial physical characteristics.
[37] Sternberg, Grigorenko & Kidd (2005) state, "Race is a socially constructed concept, not a biological one.
It derives from people's desire to classify.
"[32] The concept of human "races" as natural and separate divisions within the human species has also been rejected by the American Anthropological Association.
The official position of the AAA, adopted in 1998, is that advances in scientific knowledge have made it "clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups" and that "any attempt to establish lines of division among biological populations [is] both arbitrary and subjective.
"[38] Race in studies of human intelligence is almost always determined using self-reports, rather than based on analyses of the genetic characteristics of the tested individuals.
According to psychologist David Rowe, self-report is the preferred method for racial classification in studies of racial differences because classification based on genetic markers alone ignore the "cultural, behavioral, sociological, psychological, and epidemiological variables" that distinguish racial groups.
[39] Hunt and Carlson write that "Nevertheless, self-identification is a surprisingly reliable guide to genetic composition.
Tang et al.
(2005) applied mathematical clustering techniques to sort genomic markers for over 3,600 people in the United States and Taiwan into four groups.
There was almost perfect agreement between cluster assignment and individuals' self-reports of racial/ethnic identification as white, black, East Asian, or Latino.
"[40] Sternberg and Grigorenko disagree with Hunt and Carlson's interpretation of Tang, "Tang et al.
's point was that ancient geographic ancestry rather than current residence is associated with self-identification and not that such self-identification provides evidence for the existence of biological race.
"[41] Anthropologist C. Loring Brace[42] and geneticist Joseph Graves disagree with the idea that cluster analysis and the correlation between self-reported race and genetic ancestry support biological race.
[43] They argue that while it is possible to find biological and genetic variation corresponding roughly to the groupings normally defined as races, this is true for almost all geographically distinct populations.