Less Equality Everywhere, Including Math

Atlantic has a nice piece on increasing achievement by American teenagers in math.  Why?  "problem solving", outside class programs, STEM parents.  But these things are available to the richer among us.

"National achievement data reflect this access gap in math instruction all too clearly. The ratio of rich math whizzes to poor ones is 3 to 1 in South Korea and 3.7 to 1 in Canada, to take two representative developed countries. In the U.S., it is 8 to 1. And while the proportion of American students scoring at advanced levels in math is rising, those gains are almost entirely limited to the children of the highly educated, and largely exclude the children of the poor."

Once upon a time I was good in math.  Participated in a state-wide test (the Mathematical Olympiad) in my junior year, did well, again my senior year, not so well.  It's been downhill from there.

Vietnam Wall Replicas

I never would have thought of replicas of the Vietnam Wall, much less that there were traveling exhibits of it.  But GovExec has an article on the replicas, and DOD"s RFP for another in preparation for the 50th anniversary of the war.  I'm not sure what they're using as the starting date, certainly the first person on the Wall preceded 1966.  Thanks to wikipedia we learn it was 10 years earlier, and he was killed by "friendly fire", so to speak.  A fitting opening to a very complex and confused episode in history.

My personal 50th anniversary won't be for another 16 months or so.

The Lady in the Van

Enjoyed this movie very much.  I see on Rottentomatoes that the critics liked it better than the public (92 percent to 75). I suspect the difference is because it's not the heartwarming story you might expect.  I laughed a lot, perhaps because I'm old enough to enjoy some black humor, perhaps because I just carried over a reflex from watching Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey.  As usual, she's very convincing.

A Tear for Justice Douglas

Nathan Yau at Flowing Data has a chart of the liberal/conservative scores of all justices since 1937.  The point is to show how replacing Scalia will make a big change in the median justice.  It's fine for that.

But for me, a person who remembers the days of "Impeach Earl Warren", it's fun to look toback over history.  Liberals today are more tightly grouped than in the last 50 years.  But look at the outliers over time.  Justice Thomas is one, but the real outlier is Justice Douglas.  The metrics used run from -6 to +4 with minus being liberal and plus being conservative.    So, during the years shown (1937-2015) the outliers are:

• Douglas (-6)  (eyeballed) who wanders ever more "liberal" until the end
• Rehnquist (-4.5) who's most conservative in 1975 but grows more and more moderate, particularly after becoming chief.
• Marshall (-4.3) who becomes more liberal
• Brennan (I think) (-3.9) who becomes more liberal
• Thomas (+3.5) who's pretty consistent, a bit more moderate in recent years
• Scalia (+3.5) who's amazingly changeable, starting off at +1.2, going to +3.5 in 2000 and back to +2

The conservatives get frustrated with the Court.  A clue to why might lie in an eyeball comparison of liberals and conservative justices since Nixon--the conservative paths seem to be more scattered and variable than do the liberal ones (particularly after discounting Brennan and Marshall).  The variability probably means they're less effective in joining to form a majority.

[updated--the reason for the title of the post--Justice Douglas was talented, but he became seriously odd in his later years.)

Request for Information on Acreage Reporting

USDA is:

investigating the use of a commercially available service to provide a reporting system to support Farm Service Agency (FSA) and Risk Management Agency's (RMA) common acreage and crop reporting compliance and other program needs. The objective of this RFI is to investigate whether commercial capability presently exists that can supply a viable alternative to the current Java based in-house system. 

The actual RFI is here.

Looking at the template for responding, I'm wondering whether there's been previous extensive meetings with potential respondents.  If there hasn't, the respondents may be at a loss to complete many of the items.  

China's Rural Areas and America's

FiveThirtyEight  has a post on Monroeville, AL, which has changed since the 1930's.   That reminded me of this NYTimes piece on China's rural areas.  President Xi visited a rural town:

The bucolic scenes, shown on Chinese state television, cast Mr. Xi as a paternal leader in the footsteps of Mao, at home with the rustic virtues that once made this mountainous region of southeast China a birthplace of the Communist Party’s rural revolution.

But those images conflict with contemporary reality here. Within days, this struggling community of 250 souls will be nearly empty.

Like an increasing number of villages across China, most of its people have left to find work or attend school elsewhere, returning to their ancestral home only for the New Year holidays. The rest of the year, only 50 or so people live here, most of them elderly, usually fending for themselves.

 My point?  China's social evolution is similar to the US one, except much faster.  In our case, the rural areas emptied out over decades; in theirs, just years.  (

Crop Insurance Explained

Modern Farmer has an explanation of crop insurance, particularly the Harvest Price option, in their explanation of the cuts Obama is proposing in his last budget. Seems to me to be a reasonable explanation, not that I'm an expert these days.

The Rebel Lee, Harper That Is

The print version of the NYTimes has a picture of Harper Lee and A.C. Lee taken in 1961 on the porch of the home in Monroeville, AL. It's different than the one online in this piece.

I'm sure that town was at least as conservative as the upstate NY area I grew up in.  Three things caught my eye:

1. she's smoking, not something a proper lady did at that time.
2. she's wearing slacks, also not something a proper lady did.
3. her expression, which seems a bit rebellious and sulky.

It's interesting, in the online picture of the two, perhaps taken on the same day, the two are posed the same (A.C. facing left nearest the camera, his daughter reclining behind him facing right), no cigarette is in sight, A.C. hides the slacks (or perhaps she's wearing a dress), and the expression is more neutral.  I wonder about the story behind the two photos.

In the Post there was a picture of Ms Lee as a white-haired pleasant old lady.

Transitions and MIssing "W"s

GovExec has a piece on presidential transitions, basically from a luncheon sponsored by the White House Transition Project.

It's focused on the White House, but there could be similar efforts at the department and agency level.  Though come to think of it, it's likely in the case of USDA that incoming appointees used to work there, so have some institutional memory.

(Incidentally, now the passions have cooled, it appears the stories about the Clinton-Bush transition were overcranked.)

The No-Good Thieving Daily Mail

I'm taking Nathan Yau's account at face value, but it seems convincing--in short, The Daily Mail has stolen his visualizations twice in a year, and has been accused of making it a general practice.

Not good.