The Internet should be a transformative technology for political debates; in a matter of seconds you can verify or reject nearly any conjecture, relieving bloggers from the embarrassment of posting complete nonsense. Unfortunately, few ideological adherents avail themselves of this tool, preferring to stick with unsupportable conjecture, something I always enjoy pointing out. For a [...]
While reading a bit about KIPP schools, a compensatory education program for minority students, I found a report that has some interesting, adjacent paragraphs: [The KIPP Performance gains do] not appear to be attributable to a selective admissions process. KIPP serves minority and high-need students, many of whom performed poorly before they entered the schools. [...]
Here is an excellent comment to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The commenter, mark_r_harris, is a teacher in South Korea who explains what happens when, as the Obama administration would like, every student in a country graduates from college. On 60 Minutes a few weekends ago, it was mentioned that the Bill and [...]
There are certain dangers of speculating on the limits of science. From What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee, by Jonathan Marks, referring to the possibility of humans inbreeding with Neandertals: Could an extinct form of near-humans have interbred with us? Not only don’t we know, but we cannot know. Things we cannot know are [...]
The United Nations recently released its 2010 Human Development Report, ranking Norway as the most developed country in the world, and inviting a week of comparisons between the enlightened Norway and the dysmal, fourth-ranked United States. Such comparisons are an abuse of statistics; the US and Norway are incomparable because of the vast differences in size, social [...]
Alternet is showing itself to be a master of self promotion by brethlessly hyping the pivotal impact of its investigation into the latest Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, a group of conservative Digg users who set up a mailing lists to encourage members to “bury” stories on Digg. The group of a 100 Digg users were able [...]
Donald M Berwick is the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, appointed by president Obama a few months ago. He’s a fan of Brittian’s National Health Service, one of the “astounding human endeavours of modern times“: Cynics beware, I am romantic about the National Health Service; I love it. All I need [...]
The US Justice Department is suing the state of Arizona over SB 1070, because “The Individual Sections of S.B. 1070 are Prempted by Federal Law“. The theory, as I understand it, is that the Feds assert that only the Feds should be enforcing Federal Immigration law. The irony ( actually, one of many ) is that for [...]
After reading Charles Murray’s skepticism regarding a study of the Harlem Children Zone, I did a quick search for research about some of the programs he mentions in the article. These are some of the best known programs that attempted to improve the test scores and social skills of poor an under-preforming students: Harlem Children’s [...]
Eliot Spitzer says tax rates have no effect on GDP. Economists don’t really agree.