Tag Archives: mother

Yet Another Look at How Our Kids Are Really Doing in School

by MabelSloman Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

So how are our kids doing? I mean, really doing? In particular, how are our black high-school kids doing at math?

A few days ago I showed the results for the Long-Term NAEP math test. This is a version of the NAEP that’s stayed fairly similar over the years so that it’s possible to see long-term trends. But Bob Somerby isn’t buying it. Why not look at the Main NAEP instead, since that’s the standard version of the NAEP that usually gets all the headline?

There are two reasons. First, the Main NAEP starts in 1990, so if you want to see longer-term trends, it’s useless. More to the point, it’s not even that useful for medium-term trends because there was a major break in 2005: the test changed and the scale changed, from a 500-point scale to a 300-point scale. So what happened between 2000 and 2005? No one knows. There are no official comparisons.

Still, you can do this: look at the change from 1990-2000 and the change from 2005-2013. That should give you a reasonable idea of what’s happened over the past 25 years. When Somerby does this, he gets 6.11 + 5.24 = +11.34 points. That’s a pretty good gain. By contrast, when you look at the Long-Term NAEP scores over that same period, you get a drop of -1 points. That’s a huge difference. What’s going on?

Let’s take a crack at figuring this out. The long-term scores are easy: neither the test nor the scale have changed, so you just look at the numbers and multiply all of them by 3/5 to norm them to a 300-point scale. For the main test, we need to norm the 1990-2000 scores to a 300-point scale and then paste them together with the 2005-2013 scores. The chart on the right shows what you get.

On the long-term test, scores are still down by about 1 point. Nothing much has changed. But on the main test, scores are up by only 1 point instead of 11 points. What happened? Two things:

The 6-point increase from 1990-2000 becomes a 3.6-point increase when you renorm it to a 300-point scale.
There’s an unrecorded drop of 7.4 points between 2000 and 2005.

Altogether, this shaves about 10 points from the raw 11-point gain. If that’s accurate, it means there’s no mystery. One test is up by a point and the other is down by a point. Since these tests have a margin of error of about one point, that’s close enough to identical not to worry about.

Needless to say, this leaves us with some questions. Is it acceptable to casually renorm scores by simple multiplication? Is the drop between 2000 and 2005 real? Or is it because the test got harder? Why do scores on the main test bounce around considerably while scores on the long-term test stay pretty stable? There hardly seems to be any correlation between scores on the two tests at all.

Almost certainly, experts would be aghast at all this renorming and extrapolation. But I think it gets us closer to the truth. And one way or another, you have to account for that 2000-05 gap. If you ignore it, you’re ignoring what could be a substantial part of the story.

In any case, this is why I think you’re better off looking at the long-term test if you want to see long-term trends. That’s what it’s designed for, and you don’t have to monkey with the data. Either way, though, we end up with pretty much the same story: black test scores (and white scores and Hispanic scores) have been pretty stagnant since 1990 for high school seniors. This doesn’t mean the gains in earlier grades are nothing to celebrate. They are, and reporters should pay more attention to them. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter what the score is in the sixth inning if your bullpen consistently blows big leads. What we care about is how well educated our kids are when they leave school and enter the world. Until our high schools are able to build on the big gains they’re inheriting from middle schools, we’re not going to see any improvement on that score.

POSTSCRIPT: If you want to look at the raw data yourself, there are plenty of ways to do it. However, the following printed reports provide easy access to all of it:

Main NAEP, 1990-2000
Main NAEP, 2005-2013
Long-Term NAEP
Standard errors

For what it’s worth, two more notes. First, the main test is given to 12th graders. The long-term test is given to 17-year-olds, who are both 11th and 12th graders. Also: since 2000, the two tests have been given a year apart. Neither of these is likely to affect scores or trends in any material way.

Excerpt from – 

Yet Another Look at How Our Kids Are Really Doing in School

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Yet Another Look at How Our Kids Are Really Doing in School

Gremlins

by EnriquetaObryan Posted on September 26, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Last night the Mother Jones site suddenly went crazy—but only on Firefox on my tablet. Every other combination of site, browser, and platform works fine. This morning, AdBlock suddenly stopped working. Everywhere. Have gremlins invaded my house? I guess I’ll just wait a day or two and see if everything spontaneously fixes itself, as so often these things do.

UPDATE: Apparently AdBlock wiped out my filter subscriptions on every device. Why? Gremlins, perhaps. I added another one and now it works again. But I still have weirdo rendering on the MoJo site, on my tablet. Perhaps some strange difference between Firefox on Windows 7 (desktop) and Windows 8.1 (tablet)?

Originally from: 

Gremlins

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Gremlins

Debating the Debates: Should Democrats Have More?

by CatharineKoerst Posted on September 25, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Ryan Cooper wants more debates. Before we boo him off the stage, though, note that he’s asking for more Democratic debates. And he thinks Hillary Clinton ought to be in favor. Here’s why:

It would stop Republicans from dominating 2016 coverage….While a lot of the attention is negative due to half the candidates being strap-chewing lunatics, it’s still building a sense of excitement.

….It would give the political press something to talk about besides the endless, pointless Clinton email story.

….Clinton could probably use the practice. I still remember the first presidential debate in 2012, when President Obama was roundly defeated by Mitt Romney. Obama looked like a very powerful man who was not used to being sharply challenged, and came off as simultaneously haughty and unsure of himself. Hillary Clinton is a smart, capable person, but sycophantic courtier syndrome is a real thing, and a square debate on equal footing is one of the few ways someone of Clinton’s fame and standing can work against it.

Let’s examine this. More debates would be fun. On the other hand, it would mean yet more long nights of liveblogging for me. On the third hand—wait a second. I’m curious about something. Do other countries have debates? According to Wikipedia, yes. The following countries have regular campaign debates:

Australia
Brazil
Canada
France
Germany
Ireland
Kenya
Malta
Mexico
Netherlands
New Zealand
United Kingdom
United States

That’s not very many. Thirteen countries out of 200—and only seven that aren’t part of the old British Empire. It’s a little odd that the Anglo-Saxon bloc is so gung-ho on debates, considering that Mother Britain didn’t have its first televised debate until 2010. Of course, they only held a grand total of three, but then again, their campaign season only lasts six weeks. At that rate, we’d have 30 or 40 debates in America.

Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh yes: should Hillary Clinton welcome more debates? I’m going to say no. A presidential campaign is obviously a zero-sum affair, and all her competitors want more debates. Unless they’re idiots, that’s because they think it will benefit them—which it would, by giving them priceless exposure. Obviously Hillary has no interest in that, so like most front runners she wants fewer debates.

So all other arguments aside, the DNC is unlikely to change its mind on this. So tune in on October 13 for the first Democratic debate, held at the fabulous Trump Las Vegas. Just kidding. That would be a hoot, though, wouldn’t it? It will actually be held at the fabulous Wynn Las Vegas, owned by a Democratic billionaire rather than a Republican one.

Original post:  

Debating the Debates: Should Democrats Have More?

Posted in Brita, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Debating the Debates: Should Democrats Have More?

The EPA Is Coming After Your Defeat Devices

by AveryWinder Posted on September 25, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

If you’re using a defeat device on your car, you’d better remove it ASAP. New testing protocols are coming in the wake of the VW scandal:

The EPA is sending a letter to auto manufacturers to explain that it may test or require testing of vehicles in an environment that would resemble normal driving conditions, the official said.

….“We have to be concerned about whether or not there are other defeat devices out there that we have not been able to detect,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said at an event hosted by The Wall Street Journal this week. “This was particularly difficult for us to detect. We got there.”

Sounds like more big-government bullying by the EPA to me. I expect Republicans to do the right thing and denounce this immediately.

See original article here:  

The EPA Is Coming After Your Defeat Devices

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The EPA Is Coming After Your Defeat Devices

Spreadsheet of the Day: How Many People Did VW Kill?

by MavisNewton7 Posted on September 24, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

How many people did VW’s NOx defeat device kill? Over the weekend I did a rough estimate and figured that over the past six years VW’s excess NOx emissions probably killed about a dozen people in Southern California. Since then I’ve slightly revised my spreadsheet to account for an error, which increases my estimate to about 17 people killed. My figuring was based on:

50,000 cars sold in Southern California between 2009-2014
3,800 excess tons of NOx over six years
0.0044 deaths per ton of NOx

VW sold 500,000 altered cars in the US and 11 million cars worldwide, so this extrapolates to about 170 deaths in the United States and about 3,700 deaths worldwide.

The number of cars sold is a solid figure, and as near as I can tell the estimate of 0.0044 deaths per ton of NOx is reasonable (this paper estimates a range of .0019 to .0095). But others have come up with higher mortality estimates than mine based on a much higher estimate of excess NOx emissions. So here are my calculations:

The ICCT, which discovered the violation, says VW cars “exceeded the US-EPA Tier2-Bin5 (at full useful life) standard” by 10-35 times depending on model.
The Tier2-Bin5 standard is 0.07 grams per mile.
If VW cars averaged 30x the standard, that’s 2.1 grams per mile.
Based on (a) increasing sales year over year and (b) the fact that older cars have driven more miles, I figure that the affected cars have been driven about 1.6 billion total miles over six years.
That comes to 3.5 billion grams of NOx, or about 3,800 tons.

Over six years, this extrapolates to 38,000 tons for the United States. But at an excess emission rate of 30x, the Guardian figures about 31,000 tons per year. That’s five times my estimate.

My full spreadsheet is here. I invite comments.

Read more: 

Spreadsheet of the Day: How Many People Did VW Kill?

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Spreadsheet of the Day: How Many People Did VW Kill?

It Sure Looks Like Hillary Clinton Didn’t Have a Cunning Plan to Foil Congressional Investigators

by GiuseppPereira Posted on September 23, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This happened yesterday while I was away from my desk:

The FBI has recovered personal and work-related e-mails from the private computer server used by Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s success at salvaging personal e-mails that Clinton said had been deleted raises the possibility that the Democratic presidential candidate’s correspondence eventually could become public. The disclosure of such e-mails would likely fan the controversy over Clinton’s use of a private e-mail system for official business.

Nobody seems to have made the most obvious observation about this: It pretty strongly suggests that Hillary Clinton was not trying to hide anything when she deleted personal emails from her server.

At the risk of boring my technically-minded readers, files on a computer work sort of like an old-fashioned card catalog in a library. If you “delete” a book by tearing up the index card, the book is still there. It might be harder to find, but with a little detective work you can still dig it up. Eventually, though, the book will truly disappear. Maybe someone steals it and no one cares. Or the library needs more space and gets rid of all the books with no index cards. Etc.

This is how computers work. When you delete a file, you’re just deleting the index card. The file is still there on the hard drive. Eventually, though, the file will truly disappear. Maybe another program writes over the file. Or you run a disk defrag program and whole sections of the disk get written over. Etc. Some files will get permanently deleted within days. Others might stick around for years. It’s just random chance.

Needless to say, things don’t have to happen this way. If you want to make sure that a file is well and truly deleted, it’s easy to do. Anyone with even a smidgen of computer experience either knows how or knows how to find out. Here’s one way, which took me ten seconds to Google. If I were really serious, I’d take the time to read a bit more, and also make inquiries about backups. This is IT 101.

But apparently Hillary didn’t ask about any of this stuff. No one on her staff brought it up. They just pushed the Delete key and the emails disappeared. The IT folks were never involved.

These are not the actions of a staff trying to stonewall FOIA requests or foil a congressional committee. Any bright teenager could have done better on that score. By all the evidence, Hillary is telling the truth. She just told her staff to delete personal emails and turn over the rest to the State Department. There was nothing more to it.

But no one’s reporting it that way. Peculiar, isn’t it?

Originally posted here – 

It Sure Looks Like Hillary Clinton Didn’t Have a Cunning Plan to Foil Congressional Investigators

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on It Sure Looks Like Hillary Clinton Didn’t Have a Cunning Plan to Foil Congressional Investigators

Donald Trump Once Again Shows That He’s Probably Never Cracked Open a Bible in His Life

by YvonneMacadam24 Posted on September 23, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

David Brody asks Donald Trump, “Who is God to you?…You’ve contemplated this before, or have you contemplated this?” Here’s his reply:

Here we are on the Pacific Ocean. How did I ever own this? I bought it fifteen years ago. I made one of the great deals they say ever. I have no more mortgage on it as I will certify and represent to you. And I was able to buy this and make a great deal. That’s what I want to do for the country. Make great deals. We have to, we have to bring it back….

Wait. A question about God produces a stock speech about what a great dealmaker Trump is? Yep. Then this:

….but God is the ultimate. I mean God created this points to his golf course and nature surrounding it, and here’s the Pacific Ocean right behind us. So nobody, no thing, no there’s nothing like God.

“There’s nothing like God.” Okey doke. It sounds like Brody has his answer: Trump has not, in fact, ever contemplated the nature of God.

Brody defends Trump’s lack of a “biblically thorough answer” and says that Trump may well appeal anyway to the “I’m Sick and Tired” evangelical voter. That’s good to know. I had no idea that it was so easy to appeal to evangelical voters. Using the Trump metric, I think I could do pretty well myself. I guess all I have to do is denounce abortion and praise the Bible as the best book ever written. That sounds easy.

You know, to this day it remains part of conservative legend that a Washington Post article 20 years ago described evangelicals as “largely poor, uneducated and easily led.” It’s one of the seminal wellsprings of white Christian grievance culture. I don’t happen to know if evangelicals, on average, are poor and uneducated compared to the rest of us, but if Brody’s take on Trump is correct, it sure seems as though “easily led” was right on the mark.

Read article here:  

Donald Trump Once Again Shows That He’s Probably Never Cracked Open a Bible in His Life

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump Once Again Shows That He’s Probably Never Cracked Open a Bible in His Life

CNN Poll: Hillary Clinton Gains Ground on Bernie Sanders

by KenSanchez Posted on September 21, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Yesterday I wrote about the new CNN/ORC poll taken after Wednesday’s Republican debate. Today CNN released the results of its polling on the Democratic race, and they have it at 42 percent for Hillary Clinton vs. 24 percent for Bernie Sanders. Joe Biden is at 22 percent, but no one even knows if he’s running yet, so take that with a big grain of salt. When he’s excluded from the poll, Hillary leads Bernie by 57 percent to 28 percent. In other words, if Biden officially drops out, it’s a big win for Hillary Clinton.

Compared to earlier this month, Sanders is down 3 points and Clinton is up 5 points. Sanders appears to be getting most of his support from liberals and Independent leaners—though this is a little confusing since the poll claims to be counting only registered Democrats.

In any case, I suppose this will all get lost in the mix amid Xi-mania and pope-mania. There’s always some excuse, isn’t there?

View article: 

CNN Poll: Hillary Clinton Gains Ground on Bernie Sanders

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on CNN Poll: Hillary Clinton Gains Ground on Bernie Sanders

WTF, Volkswagen?

by ErnestiGarber Posted on September 20, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Friday I saw a bunch of headlines about Volkswagen facing possibly huge fines for violating EPA rules. There have been a lot of headlines like this recently, so I sort of shrugged and moved on.

It wasn’t until yesterday that I actually read a couple of the stories and realized what Volkswagen had actually done. Once I did, words failed me. So let’s just hand the mike to Mark Kleiman:

The story reads like the most paranoid anti-corporate fantasy, until you get to the line where the firm admits what it did….In the VW case, code was written into the engine-control software to detect the pattern of pedal and steering operations characteristic of an emissions test. Then, and only then, the car’s emissions-control machinery would kick in. Once the test was over, the software noticed that, too, and returned to normal — that is to say, illegally and dangerously dirty — operations, at about 40x the permitted — and advertised — level of nitrous oxide emissions.

Now just think about the depth of corporate depravity involved. This wasn’t one rogue engineer or engineering group at work. People up and down the chain had to be party to the crime. And note that the conspiracy held together for six years, and was finally broken not by an internal leak but by the work of outside scientists at the University of West Virginia.

In a nutshell: a whole range of VW and Audi “clean diesel” models were spewing immense amounts of nitrous oxide—a precursor to ozone formation—into the air we breathe. But if you took one of these cars in for a smog check, its engine-control software temporarily put it into a special mode that would pass the test. As soon as the test was over, the engine returned to its smog-spewing ways.

This goes far beyond most safety issues with cars. Whether we like it or not, car manufacturers always face tradeoffs between cost and safety. Having those conversations is a normal part of engineering life. Even in infamous case like the Pinto gas tank, what you have is a normal conversation that went way overboard. As bad as it is, it’s understandable that stuff like this happens occasionally.

But that’s not what this is. There was no cost involved. In fact, writing the code to do this cost Volkswagen money. Nor was it something that took place just among a small group of product managers with bad incentives. This was coldly premeditated. It required substantial testing to make it work right. It happened across not just different models, but across two different nameplates. It lasted for six years until it was discovered. And it was done not as a tradeoff of some kind, but solely to make the car peppier during test drives so that VW could sell more diesel models.

How far up does this go? It’s hard to believe it doesn’t go up pretty far. And it must have left behind a significant paper trail. So what’s next? Given the calculated nature of the crime, and the fact that it almost certainly killed people, Kleiman doesn’t think civil fines are enough:

When people conspire to commit a crime that harms the health of untold numbers of people, shouldn’t criminal charges at least be considered? And not only against the company, but against every official in it who can be shown to have known about the conspiracy….The most horrible thing about this case is that very few if any of the people involved will have lost any sleep over their guilt in making sick people sicker (and killing some of them) and none will lose face among their friends and neighbors. Even if some are found guilty of felonies, life won’t be nearly as bad for them as it is for someone who gets caught committing burglary: someone whose contribution to human suffering can’t hold a candle to what the VW conspirators pulled off.

In Georgia, a CEO is about to go to jail for a long time—maybe for life—because he approved the sale of tainted peanuts across state lines. The result was a nationwide salmonella outbreak that sickened hundreds and killed nine people. The CEO’s brother and a quality control manager at the plant also face prison time.

Did VW’s actions sicken hundreds and kill at least nine people? A quick swag suggests that VW emitted about 3,000 excess tons of nitrous oxide in Southern California alone over the past six years, which may have caused as many as a dozen or more incremental deaths. If we can put a peanut CEO in prison for this, why not an auto CEO?

Visit site: 

WTF, Volkswagen?

Posted in alo, Casio, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on WTF, Volkswagen?

Why Does Donald Trump Have Nothing Against Germany?

by ValentiCatalano Posted on September 15, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Which of these countries is not like the others?

  1. China
  2. Germany
  3. Japan
  4. Mexico

Answer: When Donald Trump goes on a tear about foreign countries that are stealing our jobs thanks to their “cunning” and “ruthless” leaders, he always talks about our horrible trade deficit. China: $300+ billion. Japan: $60+ billion. Mexico: $50+ billion.

Who doesn’t he mention? Germany, which is in second place at $80+ billion. Why is that? What is it that makes Germany not like those other countries?

And as long as we’re on the subject of Trump, I caught a bit of his speech in Dallas today and heard him bragging about the fact that every network was covering him. He explained it this way: “It’s a very simple formula in entertainment and television. If you get good ratings—and these aren’t good, these are monster—then you’re going to be on all the time even if you have nothing to say.” Credit where it’s due: Trump may not actually be much of a builder, but he sure does know his TV. And himself, apparently.

Also worth noting: Trump got plenty of cheers for all his usual shoutouts, but by far the biggest cheer came when he promised to toss out every illegal immigrant within his first 18 months. “We have to stop illegal immigration,” he said. “We have to do it.” That set the arena rocking for nearly a full minute, ending in a fervid chant of “USA! USA! USA!” Judging by this, immigration is still the single biggest key to his appeal.

Finally, on a more amusing note, Trump complained that because all his events are televised, he can’t just give the same speech over and over like other politicians. I wonder if he actually believes this? I haven’t heard anything new from Trump in months. Every speech he gives relies on all the same snippets. He changes the order depending on his mood, but it’s always the same stuff. He may be new to politics, but the idea of a standard stump speech is something he seems to have in his blood.

From:  

Why Does Donald Trump Have Nothing Against Germany?

Posted in Bragg, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Does Donald Trump Have Nothing Against Germany?