Faster than a Ray of Light?

Madonna sings about it, Length and time become imaginary when you do it, causality doesn't hold up when it happens, CERN claims to have seen it, but Einstein says "whoa, slow down..."

I think the famous xkcd sums it up pretty well:

As my old guru, Carl Sagan, used to say:  "Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof." 

I'm with Einstein for now.

Economist gets School Reform all Wrong

After reading a recent article in the Economist Magazine, The Great Schools Revolution, I was so upset that I fired a letter off to the editors. 

First, the part of the article that got me going:

"Dan Goldhaber of the University of Washington claims that “non-school factors”, such as family income, account for as much as 60% of a child’s performance in school.
Yet the link is much more variable than education egalitarians suggest. Australia, for instance, has wide discrepancies of income, but came a creditable ninth in the most recent PISA study. China, rapidly developing into one of the world’s least equal societies, finished first." ...
 "schools free of government control and run by non-state providers are adding quality to the mix. To date, they seem most successful where the state has been unwilling or unable to make a difference. It is still not clear whether creating archipelagoes of Free Schools and charter schools will consistently drive improvement in other institutions, or whether that is wishful thinking."
[emphasis mine]

Now, my rebuttal:

SIR - In your article on "The great schools revolution" you briefly site studies that conclude that "non school factors" such as income are the dominant factors in a child's performance in school, but then go on to wave away the studies by cavalierly citing China and Australia's good PISA results as a counter example.

                China, the nation, did not take the PISA; Shanghai and Hong Kong did.  If you care to look, you can find single cities in America that beat them both.  Australia has an average score slightly higher than the mean OECD score.  However, if you look at the wide variations within Australia, you'll see that, not surprisingly to "education egalitarians", Australia's regional scores vary with their "wide discrepancies of income", ranging from far below the OECD average to far above.   Additionally, the administering of the PISA in Australia has been fraught with difficulty:  biased student sampling, teacher boycotts, etc.  Citing China and Australia to throw out the link between income and testing results is sloppy reporting by any standard.

                Schools are reflections of the local society in which they are placed.  Although there is much that can be done within the school walls, the real work for society is in addressing the pockets of poverty which ultimately produce the poor educational results.  Freeing schools of "government control" may be the "most striking" element of school reform to your writers, however, many charter schools in America only graduate a fraction of the students they admit.  Which students left the charters, and where did they go?  In many cases, they were the lowest performing students, and they appeared quietly in their assigned seat at a school under "government control".

Ken Rideout,

Boston, Massachusetts

Sources:

http://nasspblogs.org/principaldifference/2010/12/pisa_its_poverty_not_stupid_1.html

http://www.stltoday.com/suburbanjournals/metro/education/article_bb02d2ab-331c-5583-ab30-8ee2f221b97e.html

 http://www.oecd.org/document/53/0,3746,en_32252351_32235731_38262901_1_1_1_1,00.html

 http://www.acer.edu.au/ozpisa/geographical-location

 http://www.btu.org/hot-issues/charter-schools/mta-study-looks-at-charter-school-success

Cupcakes and the Model Minority

UC Berkeley Republicans made headlines this week when they held a cupcake sale to protest a new admissions policy designed to help improve racial diversity.   "Baked goods were sold to white men for $2, Asian men for $1.50, Latino men for $1, black men for 75 cents and Native American men for 25 cents. All women received 25 cents off those prices." "We agree that the event is inherently racist, but that is the point," Lewis wrote in response to upheaval over the bake sale. "It is no more racist than giving an individual an advantage in college admissions based solely on their race (or) gender."(CNN)

Okay - reality check.  White people will be helped out and Asians will be hurt by any attempt at racial balancing at UC Berkeley.  The dominant race at the school is Asian (data here).  Hello, College Republicans, do the math before you price your cupcakes:  Asians should pay the highest price for those cupcakes!

The media has focused on the pricing by race - but I find it more interesting that the pricing points don't correspond to the reality.  If their point is that some people are getting an unjust helping hand, flip the pricing for "White" and "Asian"!

Clocks and Northern Dominance

Clockwise and counter clockwise are common terms that come from, well, clocks. 

And those hands on the clocks move that way because... the shadows in a sundial turn that way! 

However, sundials in the southern hemisphere have noon pointing south and the shadow moves counter clockwise as you look down on them.  Once again, something we all take for granted as fundamental is just an accident of fate (northern hemisphere folk invented the first clocks and watches I suppose and thus got to determine "clockwise" and "counter clock wise" for all time thereafter).