Saturday, March 01, 2008

Using Statistics as Support


The graph shows that there is a positive statistical correlation between level of education and income (Baum, Sandy, and Payea 10). The higher education the workers have, the more they earn. According to statistics on College Board Online, people who have professional degrees have the highest median income, earning US$95,700 in 2003. The earnings of people with professional degrees are almost twice as high as those of people with bachelor's degrees. In fact, yearly income decreases as the level of education goes down. For example, people without high school diplomas only earn $21,600 a year, which only equals 43.3% of the median earnings of people with bachelor's degrees and 22.6% of the median earnings of people with professional degrees (qtd. in Mclntyre et al. Table 3). To sum up, level of education correlates with income; workers with higher educational achievement get higher pay.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2004a, PINC-03; Internal Revenue Service, 2004, Table 3; McIntyre, et al., 2003; calculations by the authors.

Using Quotations as Support

Computers cannot be compared to human brains. The first reason is that the information-processing capacity of the human brain is more powerful than any computer. According to an article titled “Can a Computer Be Conscious?” in U.S. News & World Report, “It has been estimated that the information-processing capacity of even the most powerful supercomputer is equal to the nervous system of a snail—a tiny fraction of the power available to the supercomputer inside the human skull” (64). Moreover, the kinds of processing in a human brain and a computer are different, too. For example, author Steven Pinker reported that computers found it easy to remember a 25-digit number but found it hard to summarize the gist of [children's story] “Little Red Riding Hood,” and humans found it hard to remember the number but easy to summarize the story (64).

Source: Both quotations are on page 64 of a magazine article titled "Can a computer Be Conscious?" by Steven Pinker. The article appeared on pages 63-65 of the news magazine U.S. News & World Report on August 18, 1997.
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1997_08_18_usnewsworldreport.html