IB diploma points vs SAT composite averages at international schools
I ran across these interesting data today showing a range of metrics for a few dozen of the most prominent American/International schools around the world. Most of these schools are private and non-profit. A commenter hypothesized that IB diploma scores and SAT composite averages were uncorrelated. It turns out that (s)he is maybe right — the two series have a weak positive correlation, but the standard error is high, and the relationship is only significant at the 80% level.
Here’s a chart showing the relationship. This tells you that for every 1-point increase in the IB diploma scores, a school will tend to have a 21-point better SAT composite average. The standard error on that estimate is 15 (t-stat ~ 1.4; p-value ~ 0.18).
The number of data points is low, but you might interpret this weak relationship as evidence that these two programs — standardized test vs holistic multi-year curriculum — measure different sets of skills, and that colleges are wise to consider them separately.
IB vs SAT scores at international schools
Kwedit Crisis
A new service has appeared, called Kwedit, which allows the borrower to buy (usually virtual) goods now and pay for them by printing a barcode and paying cash at a 7-Eleven store.
The service has been adopted by a small handful of online games with target audiences in the 12-14 age group. The idea is to bypass parents, aka the keepers of the credit cards. These children can thus purchase items for their virtual pets, for example.
Now an eighth grader, on her own, can use a Kwedit Promise to buy a virtual 40-pound bag of Purina Puppy Chow. The chow exists only as a photograph of a Purina package, but FooPets instructs its users that the care and feeding of the digital pets they’ve adopted should be regarded as a serious matter. “Your FooPet is a real creature that lives online,” the company’s Web site says. It’s ontological nonsense, but the money that is paid for the pixels is certainly real.
On the one hand, kids need to learn lessons about money and credit. Perhaps if they get in over their heads, they will learn a valuable early lesson in effective money management. Better now, when there are no real consequences, than later, when they default on their mortgage. Right?
But something stinks about this, beyond the fact that 12-year-olds shouldn’t be frequenting 7-Elevens. Kids are vulnerable — they are powerfully swayed by “ontological nonsense.” (But aren’t we all?) We can’t expect them to make reasonable choices, nor can we even expect them to learn the right lesson from their errors when they make unreasonable choices.
Should corporate interests really be allowed to so directly engage minors in this way? Yes, teens can buy candy at the store on their own. But they can’t buy candy on credit. I suppose it’s legal, but there’s something wrong here I can’t put my finger on.
Common Sense
While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting)
My year in cities 2009
At least one night spent in each city in 2009. An asterisk indicates multiple non-contiguous visits.
- Boulder, CO
- Denver, CO
- Boise, ID
- Boston, MA (*)
- Epping, NH
- Indianapolis, IN
- Chiang Dao, Thailand
- Chiang Mai, Thailand (*)
- Bangkok, Thailand (*)
- London, UK (*)
- Chicago, IL (*)
- Brooklyn, New York, NY (*)
- Manhattan, New York, NY (*) — most visited (5 times)
- San Francisco, CA (*)
- Berkeley, CA (home)
- Lansing, NY (*)
- Portland, OR (Initially omitted because I used my past flight schedules to tally cities, but we drove to Ryan and Eliz’s house for Thanksgiving. Thanks, Eliz.)
Pith: Subtitles and the Condescension of Marketing Nonfiction
Look carefully at the titles of the top 10 bestselling nonfiction books on Amazon. OK, don’t bother – I’ll list them for you. As of December 20, 2009 at 1:50 pm Eastern time, the top ten nonfiction sellers on the US Amazon store are:
- Going Rogue: An American Life (Sarah Palin)
- SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance (Steven Levitt)
- Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government (Glenn Beck)
- Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Greg Mortenson)
- Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell)
- Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves (Andrew Ross Sorkin)
- Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time (Greg Mortenson)
- Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto (Mark R. Levin)
- Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (Nicholas Kristof)
- A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity (Bill O’Reilly)
See any patterns here? I see several. First of all, it appears that conservatives are searching for a hero, and Palin looks better than the crusty talk-show hosts. Second of all, since gaining the White House, liberals apparently feel secure enough to engage in the leisurely fantasy that schools will end war and that we can simply “turn oppression into opportunity” for women. Third, the national conversation remains political.
But what I want to write about today is more insidious — it is the way these books are titled. Of the top 10, only O’Reilly’s #10 slot is not occupied by a title of the form “[Pithy title]: [Overly simplistic framing of the book's topic].” I guess that earns him the right to call himself a “bold fresh piece of humanity.” Come to think of it, it’s his publisher that deserves the accolade — titles are routinely chosen by the marketing machine, not by the author. (The Palin title is so utterly stupid, however, that I wonder whether it was the only original writing she did on it. Or maybe the publisher was just being ironical.)
What bothers me about these titles is not that they all contain subtitles. Subtitles have been around for centuries. But, these days, the smarmy way they trumpet and preen instead of simply explicate gets under my skin. Have readers been reduced to simpletons? Can society no longer tolerate depth and subtlety and nuance? Are the titles of books forever stripped of gravitas?
From “book titles, if they were written today”:
Then: [An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of] the Wealth of Nations
Now: Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from ThemThen: Walden
Now: Camping with Myself: Two Years in American TuscanyThen: The Theory of the Leisure Class
Now: Buying Out Loud: The Unbelievable Truth About What We Consume and What It Says About UsThen: The Gospel of Matthew
Now: 40 Days and a Mule: How One Man Quit His Job and Became the Boss
It’s funny because it’s true – the titles of books today are a sad, often misleading, representation of the ideas in the text. Gone are the days when the seminal work of the age has a title like “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica” – another language, for Pete’s sake!
I’ll end with my appeal to publishers: if you spend as much energy deciding what cruft not to publish as you do crafting clever subtitles, we’d all be better off.
Storyboard – Star Wars
Combining my love of info-graphics (especially hand-drawn) and Star Wars, xkcd has produced what it calls “movie narrative charts,” partially represented below. From the chart, “The horizontal axis is time. The vertical grouping of the lines indicates which characters are together at a given time.” Click for the full version, which also includes The Lord of the Rings, Primer, and Twelve Angry Men.
Star Wars narrative diagram from xkcd.com
Halloween Hijinks
Just the first video I could get my hands on of our roving Cantina Band in the Mission last night. I’m on glockenspiel, C is playing the gourd-adorned whistle. Other instruments included: clarinet, fiddle-phone (my own word for it), bass guitar, tuba, flute, and toy accordion.
We roamed the streets, playing street corners and random Halloween crowds, performing in all manner of bars and restaurants – fancy, dive, crystal stemware, pint glasses – to rousing ovations. Most people recognized us on sight – “Hey look! It’s the Star Wars cantina band!” – but it blew their minds when we actually played the music. A great effect.
See some pictures here, including the Cantina Band “Alderaan Road” photo shoot.
UPDATE: for facebook users, more pictures here and here.
UPDATE 2: I swapped out the youtube video above to a higher-quality version. We also have a flickr groups page set up – http://www.flickr.com/groups/1228151@N25/ – and there are other videos here, here, and here.
UPDATE 3: Found on Laughing Squid and Current.com (which seems to have scraped it wholesale from Laughing Squid… tut tut).
Halloween Hype
I was hoping to have pictures and video of the Halloween dress rehearsal from last night, but there seems to be some delay. In the meantime, here’s a hint:
Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes
Nothing News
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you are probably aware of the precipitous decline of print news circulation over the past decade, almost universally attributed to the ubiquitous and free news any joe with a mobile phone can access nowadays. Here’s a rather stunning visual.
Some unsurprising trends: the Los Angeles Times is an absolute horrorshow. Not shown: the Boston Globe disappearing off the bottom of this chart, in a two decade decline from 521,000 in 1990 to 264,105 this year.
Sad to see the LA Times doing such a dreadful business – I think they have the best online design of any major news outlet. Certainly better than my local paper, and a lot less blood-red-awful than that other media loser, the lowest-rated cable news provider, CNN.
I love McSweeney’s defiant response:
Issue 33 of McSweeney’s Quarterly will be a one-time-only, Sunday-edition sized newspaper—the San Francisco Panorama. It’ll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there.
…just $55.
Best Berkeley Brunches
I’m a big fan of the brunch – really, breakfast food is what I’m after, about a 90/10 split between savory and sweet. Here are my favorite Berkeley brunch spots.
| Name | Food | Coffee | Atmosphere | Cost | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fellini | *** | *** | **** | $$ | *** |
| Just three blocks from our first Berkeley apartment, Fellini eventually became our go-to restaurant for dinner, brunch, and on-the-go coffee (via their out-door coffee bar). The brunch menu has plenty of favorites, but tends to be on the vegan/healthy side, viz. no pork bacon (turkey only), lots of tofu scrambles, no really fatty hollandaise-laden dishes. | |||||
| Bette’s Oceanview Diner | ***** | **** | **** | $$ | ****+ |
| It doesn’t technically have an ocean view, but it is in the neighborhood formerly known as “Oceanview,” now called “4th Street” because, well, there’s not much else around except the stuff on 4th Street. My theory is that Bette’s accounts for a significant amount of retail foot traffic that would otherwise not bother to stop. The food is simply awesome – beautiful breakfasts without being boring (or too creative). On-menu items are great, but more often than not I end up with one of the weekly specials. The homemade chorizo is excellent. The only drawback is the wait: two people on a weekend morning will likely wait 45 minutes. Four people can expect to wait an hour. | |||||
| Jimmy Bean’s | **** | *** | **** | $$ | **** |
| A great selection of egg-based dishes with a slight Mexican recipe bias. Partial service means you stand in line to order, but even a long queue usually clears up within 10-15 minutes. Good espresso drinks, passable communal-carafe drip coffee. French toast offered Real maple syrup, but otherwise unremarkable. No peanut butter. Good bacon. Besides being a great brunch spot, the secret of Jimmy Bean’s is their low-cost, great-atmosphere, full-service dinner. | |||||
| Crepevine | *** | *** | ** | $$ | ** |
| So new it’s not even on their website’s list of locations, the occupant of the corner space on Shattuck and Cedar serves a reasonable meal. Service is a bit lacking (rare coffee refills, slow to clean up abandoned tables), and the high ceilings make the place seem more like a “warehouse” than “spacious and bright.” Beware the namesake crepes, as well – ours was soggy, drowned in its own topping-juice. But if you’re making a stop at Andronico’s anyway… it works. | |||||
| Liaison Bistro | **** | **** | ***** | $$$ | **** |
| This is the kind of place you take out-of-town company or a date – I feel underdressed in my hoodie. Service is way beyond the other contenders on this list, and the food is very well-prepared. The menu has a predictably French bias, but is recognizable brunch fare. Items of note include the list of “Croques” in place of the “Benedicts” found on everyone else’s menu. Liaison also serves a steak-and-eggs, which used to be my signature breakfast dish in college; it was the only plate I could manage to clean. | |||||
| Bacheeso’s | **** | * | ***** | $$ | *** |
| Some great Mediterranean-styled dishes here, but I only ever order the German Farmer’s Omelette, so I can’t speak from experience. They also have a huge breakfast buffet, which I avoid because buffets are always money-losing propositions for me. The drip coffee tasted funky on at least two occasions, and is not very satisfying on its best days. Five-star atmosphere for the consistent appearance of the way-cool accordion player, who entertains you with strains of Hotel California, Ace of Base, and various other pop songs. | |||||
| Cafe Fanny | **** | **** | * | $$ | *** |
| An Alice Waters joint, Cafe Fanny has wonderfully simple and tasty food. For example, do this at home: toast a wide slice of levain or ciabatta; fry or poach an egg and place on top of the toast; sprinkle with salt, pepper, oregano, and a few drops of red wine vinegar. Delicious. One star for atmosphere due to the fact that seating is essentially confined to two parking spaces in the midst of other parked cars on a busy street. | |||||
| Chester’s Bayview Cafe | *** | *** | ** | $$+ | ** |
| Unremarkable interior… or maybe it just feels empty during brunch hours. Great location off Shattuck. Nothing special on the menu. They charge extra for organic eggs (wtf?). | |||||
