Monthly Archives: November 2011

View 703 Wednesday, November 30, 2011

If you haven’t been following Fred, he has a neat satire: http://fredoneverything.net/LLA.shtml

It will also lead you to a description of the toughest undergrad math class in the country. Fred’s piece is satire, but it’s true enough that Math 55 classes do not look like America.

I really don’t want to spend a lot of time on the election, but I weary of the nonsense being said about the immigration issue. The immigration hawks always bring up the gang members and their molls, and the specter of amnesty as a magnet to draw people in, Amnesty certainly is a magnet, but given the flow into the US just now it’s clear we don’t need a magnet to have a steady flow of illegal immigrants seeking work.

The first thing, then, is to close the border. Build fences. Build moats. If you’re really serious build a mine field. Go look at der Grenze, the border control system of the USSR in Europe: it was intended to keep people in, but it worked to keep them out, too; and as to magnets, the lure of free Austria and West Germany was quite strong. Yes, some got across those borders, but it wasn’t that many. If we’re serious about closing a border we can do it, just as if we are serious about controlling employment of illegal immigrants that can be done too.

But I do wonder: what proportion of those insisting that all eleven million – 1.1 x 10^7 – illegal immigrants have got to be deported have an undocumented nanny, or really know the immigration status of all the members of their gardening crew? But assume that they are all serious, what do we do with, say, a 70 year old man who has been the janitor in a church for 25 years, has two citizen daughters who are members of that parish and four grandchildren, also all citizens. It is now his retirement party. He’s going to go live with one of his children. Do we send a federal agent to his retirement party to handcuff and deport him?

Eleven million people is a lot of people. We can probably get about a million to self-deport by offering rewards for voluntary deportation. Start with $1,000, and when that is done raise the stakes to $2,000. When those cherries are picked you look at the immigration status of everyone arrested on suspicion of a felony, and act accordingly. That will probably get another million burglars, at probably about $2,000 each, plus a few expensive law suits to establish that we’re not interested in whether or not they are guilty of the felony that got them arrested, they are clearly guilty of being illegally in the US, and yes, we really did check the immigration or citizenship status of everyone arrested for burglary (or whatever) in that jurisdiction for the past few weeks, etc. If we’re really lucky the self-deportations and automatic deportations for felony arrests will get us down to, say, 7 million illegal immigrants in the US. That’s still a lot. Now what? Expand the program to check status of everyone arrested for anything? Think of the law suits when someone gets deported for jumping a turnstile. And of course there’s driving without a license as an automatic deportation for illegals. Now we go after anyone using someone else’s social security number, and after that anyone who uses a fake SS #.

And when you have done all that you will still have 4 to 5 million illegal aliens present in these United States. Some of them are likely to be solid citizens. Others may well be ne’er-do-wells. Shall we go examine the documents of every ne’er-do-well in the country? But don’t people who haven’t committed any crime but are generally just not considered desirable have some kind of rights? Do we go back to vagrancy laws? When I was young “No visible means of support” was a valid reason for someone to be arrested, and it was often used to shake down young people hitchhiking across country. Happened to me, once. Easier to pay the ten bucks than stay in the Podunk cooler while they verified my student status and that I had a place of residence in Iowa City. Of course no one hitchhikes any more. Worse, the courts have hammered away at the vagrancy laws, but we could perhaps find a way around that?

My point is that a few minutes’ thought will show that dealing with the eleven million illegal immigrants already here is not as simple as “Send out enough agents, round them up, and throw them out!” We all know that. Perhaps Newt Gingrich brought it up precisely to set the boundary at “road to legality but not citizenship” as opposed to full amnesty. He may be looking past the primary to the general election.

Brian Hall’s Perfect Climate Irony

Jerry,

You should know that the article that Brian Hall references did not look at the complete data set published to date by JAXA (which can be found here: http://www.gosat.nies.go.jp/eng/result/download/GOSAT_L4_Release_en.pdf), but focuses on one graph for July 2009. Not much can be gleaned just from the full set of graphs alone — just that there are months when various regions are net sinks for CO2 and other months when those same regions are net sources. Net sourcing over land seems to predominate over time, but that does not mean that that the few months of net sink do not out weigh the many months of net sourcing.

My advice is for everyone to read the full article at the link I have provided. This debate over AGW will not get settled by ignoring or misconstruing data.

Keegan

Kevin L. Keegan

I agree. This probably ought to be paired with the original mail comment. What we are trying to do here is conduct a rational discussion of a topic that has become anything but rational. I am convinced that CO2 has been steadily rising since 1850 or so; the question is what effect does that have, and whether the rise is great compared to the frequent injections of CO2 by volcanic events, ocean current circulations bringing up warmer/colder water, and such. The evidence seems to be clear that there have been wide CO2 swings in the past.

Arrhenius did some back of the envelope calculations on CO2 effects back around 1900. They seem to be as good a model as the billion dollar computer simulations we now rely on.

In another conference we got to wondering what the difference between courts martial and military tribunals might be, and I wondered what rules, if any, the 1942 tribunal that President Roosevelt set up to deal with the 8 Nazi saboteurs landed by submarine in Long Island and in Florida operated under. They found all eight guilty and six were summarily executed. I have been unable to find anything about the composition of this tribunal or what rules it followed. It sentenved all eight to death, including two who had cooperated with the FBI and made their capture possible. What evidence it heard (did it know that two of them were in fact turned and worked for the FBI to help catch the other six?), what the ranks of the tribunal members or indeed how many there were, and what instructions it operated under seem to have been suppressed successfully. It’s all mysterious even though the US Supreme Court QUINN decision, which affirmed the President’s right to act in this case, is now used to support the argument for the use of tribunals in the War on Terror.

We do know how the Tribunals operate now. Comparison of Rights in Military Commission Trials and Trials in Federal Criminal Court, by Jennifer K. Elsea, Legislative Attorney, January 26, 2010 discusses this in detail. It is published by Congress.

I still don’t know anything about the 1942 Tribunal.

Subject: USDA fines Ringling Bros. Circus over treatment of animals

Looks like the bunny inspectors have moved on to bigger targets. Based on the explanations, this sure looks like a spurious lawsuit by animal protection activists who couldn’t get their agenda supported through their normal methods.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/29/us/ringling-bros-fine/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Tracy

Thanks. We may add that to bunny inspectors as jobs that probably don’t need doing, and certainly are not so vital that we must borrow the money to do them. The US is simply not serious about cutting spending or reducing the deficit, and few of the candidates are either. Why?

View 703 Tuesday, November 29, 2011

· The Texas/Wisconsin Education Paradox

· The Flynn Effect and Raising IQ

Teach your child to read

The Texas/Wisconsin Education Paradox

For about a week I have been running this as a teaser:

I will give you one fact to ponder over the weekend.

Some Teachers Unions have pointed out that the average grade and high school performances in Wisconsin, which has teachers unions, are higher than the corresponding averages in Texas, which is a right to work state. This is true. The average student performance in Wisconsin is higher than the average student performance in Texas.

It is also true that the average black student performance in Texas is higher than black student performance in Wisconsin. The average Hispanic student performance in Texas is higher than the average Hispanic student performance in Wisconsin. The average white (non-Latino) student performance in Texas is higher than the average white (non-Latino) student performance in Wisconsin. The three classes are collectively exhaustive.

These facts are true, and they are not contradictory although they may appear to be. We’ll talk more about this next week, but if you are moved to comment I’m listening.

It’s time and past time to resolve this. It’s not really a paradox, and there are no contradictions. The resolution is simple but politically incorrect, and if one brings up this subject one ought also to discuss some of the implications.

The correct conclusion here is that Texas does a better job at grade through high school education than Wisconsin, but there are inequalities in the performances of the three groups; one of the groups scores higher than the other two; and there are more of the high-scoring group in Wisconsin than in Texas, and fewer of the low scoring groups in Wisconsin than in Texas. Thus, no matter your group, you will (on average) get a better education in Texas than in Wisconsin, and the hypothesis that the unionization in Wisconsin improves the performance of the schools is falsified. You will, on average, be better off in Texas when it comes to education of yourself or your children. We can infer all that without knowing the actual numbers of either group performance or group numbers; we need one set of those numbers only if we want to identify which group has the better performance. Given the locations of Texas and Wisconsin we probably have a reasonable hypothesis as to which states have the highest numbers of each group, and thus an inference as to which group has the highest average scores.

The problem is that it’s fairly obvious which group has the highest average, but if anyone admits knowing it that person is subject to an automatic charge of racism; indeed the charge is likely to be certain and there will be a very high probability that the person making the charge will be unable to understand the argument, and will insist that the whole outcome is racist. Worse, that person will very likely be a public figure featured as a leader of one or another of the ethnic groups. Of course what I just said will be called racist. This is a subject that one opens at peril. I confess I have been avoiding it because it will probably open a firestorm. It usually does.

Note that the teachers unions are not ashamed to take advantage of the situation. They’re the ones who brought up the better average performances in unionized Wisconsin over right to work Texas. They made a true statement; they just avoided alternate hypotheses over the superiority of unionized schools.

To remove any lingering ambiguity: if you rank order the states by grade and high school performance you will have one list. If you rank order them by percentage of non-Latino White and all the others you will get another list. Compare lists and they will be nearly identical. If you want to refine it more, put in Asians. If you want to refine it even more, segregate the Asians, and segregate the Whites by extracting the Ashkenazy Jews into a separate category. Now compute averages for all the racial groups.

When you finish fiddling with this you will find in general there is a rank order of averages more or less predictable by race. The best average will be Ashkenazy Jews; then Asians; then White; then Latino; then Black. Note we are talking about averages. We can also look at grade averages by IQ ignoring race, and that will turn out to do an even better job of predicting grades. The highest IQ’s will get the highest grades, and the correlations will be about as good as you are going to get in dealing with the social sciences. Moreover, if you use IQ, this will be fairly stable over many years: that is, if you have the IQ at age 6, you have a reasonable prediction of high school grade average and a very good prediction of IQ at the time of high school graduation. Of course it won’t be perfect. There are a lot of ways to lower one’s IQ and a lot of ways to make ones grades go down. There are also social factors: lower IQ working hard will often out-perform high IQ taking it easy. I doubt any of this is new to anyone.

The problem here has plagued education planners for a very long time. At onset it would seem to be obvious that education in abstract thinking is costly, and largely wasted on those who aren’t going to learn it in the first place. This used to be accepted knowledge: for those school districts that could afford it, there was a college prep track, a technical education track, and a general education track. In Memphis where I grew up the bright young public school pupils went to Central High and all took the college prep program; those not interested in a college education but fairly good at technical skills went to Memphis Tech, which taught draughtsmanship, technical math, and a whole host of shop skills. Everyone else went to a neighborhood high school where they had a general curriculum that included college prep courses, but they didn’t have to take the college prep courses and most didn’t. Meanwhile the University of Tennessee was set up to admit all the actual graduates of the college prep programs. Those included at least 2 years of a foreign language, algebra and analytical geometry if not calculus, plane and spherical geometry, 4 years of English, chemistry, physics, and biology. Get through all that and you were automatically admitted to either the University of Tennessee or one of the State Colleges. Tuition was nominal. I have friends who went to Memphis State right out of Central High; they lived at home and it essentially cost them nothing. By that time most of the Tennessee State Teachers Colleges and Normal Schools had been upgraded to State College level. Now, of course, they are all various State Universities, the faculties are paid a lot more, and even though there are a lot more of them it’s too expensive to take in all the qualified high school graduates without charging huge tuitions and fees. That’s a good deal for the faculty and administrators. Not so much for the students.

Now in my time the system was legally segregated, and the only debates on racism involved whether there ought to be quotas on Jews getting admission to the University of Tennessee; that is, no one questioned that they were welcome to the state college system, but there needed to be a quota at UT. I left the state while that debate was going on, and I haven’t been back (except for brief visits and conventions) since desegregation. Of course the system was unfair and the “separate but equal” argument was a sham (although Boss Ed Crump of Memphis did make a sincere effort to upgrade Booker T. Washington High School to “equal” Central High in facilities and faculty pay; he said it was just fair, others said it was to avoid Federal desegregation). The point here, though, is that charges of “racism” didn’t enter the picture of this rather neat system of differentiation between college prep, technical, and general high school education. It was manifestly racial so there wasn’t anything to debate.

Incidentally, in those days I was considered a hopeless radical because I thought the law ought to be color blind. I didn’t have any close friends who were black, but then I didn’t have a lot of close friends at all, being as nerdy stuck up an intellectual as you were likely to find. (That’s why I went out for boxing in high school. I read in a Leslie Charteris Saint story about the effectiveness of “scientific boxing”, there being no “martial arts” in those days. Boxing actually worked pretty well, although what I learned was probably less effective than the training to get into shape…) In any event I didn’t hang out much the way high schoolers do now, but when I did I was happy enough to find anyone smart enough to talk to, and that sometimes included black kids. Of course it was illegal for us to sit together in drug stores, thus the origin of my “law ought to be color blind”; it was all purely personal. But that too is another story.

The point of all this ramble is that from my experience it’s always a very good idea to structure a school system on the theory that this isn’t Lake Wobegon. Half the children will be below average, and of those above average a lot of them will neither want nor need a college prep education. Some will do well with what they called a technical school education, and a great number of them will do well with a general high school education that includes home economics, hygiene, enough math to do your income tax, and practice in reading and writing. Those who want more can try for more. There are junior colleges – that’s what we used to call “Community Colleges” for those who want skills. The University and College system is for those trying to enter the professions.

All very idyllic, but it worked pretty well in those times, and would probably work now – except that no matter what means you use to sort students into the groups “college prep”, “technical”, and “the rest”, you will find a disproportionate high number of Whites in the college prep group, and a disproportionate high number of Blacks in “the rest”. And that will happen even if you sort the groups at random and weed out the failures, so long as your college prep group is actually getting a quality prep education. About the only socially acceptable remedy is some form of affirmative action coupled with changing the standards of success.

Does this mean that I think blacks are stupid? No. I do think that the proportion of blacks who want and need a university prep education is lower than the proportion of whites, and that it is no favor to any pupils, black, white, striped, or purple, to put them in classes that are routinely too hard for them and in which they see no relevance to their future lives. No favor is a euphemism. Meanwhile, putting the bright kids in groups where what is being taught is obvious from the first words (or often from last night’s homework) is to build a living hell for them. I was spared that, but I have many friends who were not, and a novelist has to have  empathy for such things.

It isn’t as if this is new information. They were debating these points when I was an undergraduate in the 1950’s. Indeed, the State of Illinois tried to prohibit the publication of any scientific journal that “degraded the intelligence” of any race, whatever the heck that means; it was applied to some of the early stories correlating race and IQ. Yet for over 50 years study after study has shown the same effective correlations of race and IQ. There have been frantic and very expensive attempts to make “culture free” IQ tests, and “eliminate racial bias” from IQ tests, and though they were sincerely intended they all failed. The one-sigma difference between black and white IQ remains pretty steady.

The next attempt, and one I very much approved of, was Head Start which was intended to take children from inner city schools and give them an educational head start so that when they got to Kindergarten or First Grade they would be culturally and educationally even with their classmates. I don’t know of anyone who disapproves of Head Start (indeed I tried to get it expanded to teach the beginnings of phonics reading in the Head Start program although the NEA insists that they children are not “ready” to learn reading at that age and continue to forbid it; but that’s another story). Head Start funding is seldom debated. Everyone I know desperately hopes it will succeed, because, among other things, it will make it a lot easier to reform the general school system and start giving appropriate education to students according to their abilities. Everyone I know would cheer mightily if by magic the average IQ of blacks suddenly rose to equal that of whites.

The problem is that increasingly frantic attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of Head Start have been unable to find any meaningful distinction between Head Start and non Head Start children three or more years after they leave Head Start. The program is costly; but if it worked, if it could produce larger numbers of blacks who wanted and needed college prep education, it would arguably be one of the most cost/effective programs in history. I don’t know anyone who would not cheer.

But that never happened.

The result is that we continue to have the silliness we have in the public school system, which is rapidly creating a rigid class system: those wealthy enough to send their children to good schools, and the rest who have no choice but to turn their children over to the tender mercies of a disastrous public school system, which operates chiefly to the benefit of the teacher unions. And note that the Teachers Unions are the ones who started this fight.

For those interesting in following any of this up, or in data sources, I call your attention to one of my favorite public intellectuals: Why I Love the Internet and Am Proud to Be from Iowa, by Charles Murray. Murray will lead you to two articles that discuss the Texas/Wisconsin paradox in more detail. I’ll also include some of the mail I have received on this in my next mailbag.

The Flynn Effect and Raising IQ

And, by sheer coincidence, today’s Wall Street Journal has an article “Ways to Inflate Your IQ” (link) which offers what may be a ray of hope, and suggests ways of restructuring Head Start (although the article doesn’t mention that).

All those who study race and IQ are, or really should be, aware of the Flynn Effect. There’s a decent introduction to it (at least the opening sections are decent; I didn’t read it all) on Wikipedia. The Flynn effect was named by Charles Murray and his collaborator in The Bell Curve, but I’d heard of it well before that book was published. In a nutshell it says that everyone in the world is getting smarter, and that the lower IQ racial IQ averages are going up faster than the higher. It’s important to note that these are averages; the proportion of true geniuses to the rest of the population doesn’t seem to be any higher. There is also debate about the magnitude of the effect, and just what it is doing. This excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on “race and IQ” should illustrate the controversy:

A 2006 study by Dickens and Flynn estimated that the black-white gap closed by about 5 or 6 IQ points between 1972 and 2002,^[66] which would be a reduction by about one-third. However this was challenged by Rushton & Jensen who claim the gap remains stable.^[67] Murray in a 2006 study agree with Dickens and Flynn that there has been a narrowing of the gap, "Dickens’ and Flynn’s estimate of 3–6 IQ points from a base of about 16–18 points is a useful, though provisional, starting point". But he argues that this has stalled and that there has been no further narrowing for people born after the late 1970s.^[68] He found similar results in a 2007 study.^[69]

How this folds in with the physiological results reported in this Wall Street Journal article isn’t clear, but they certainly are related.

On the other hand, waiting for the Flynn effect or improved Head Start before we improve – actually drastically restructure – our failed public school system is not a viable option for a real civilization. If we let political correctness rob us of another generation – if we waste the bright students by forcing them into a watered down curriculum just so that every child gets the “world class university prep education” that Bill Gates says everyone deserves; if we condemn the normal and dull normal students to the confusion of a real university prep education they don’t need and can’t fathom; if we confine real university prep education to private schools and a few fortunate oases in the public school wastelands; we will pay for it with much more unemployment and many wasted minds.

I rejoice that there may be ways to raise IQ and I certainly hope there is decent but not lavish funding for converting these observations into practical education programs. I am also certain that it’s going to take a while for that to happen; and just now the world is in a crisis. We can’t afford to waste smart people because of political correctness – and we aren’t doing anything to help achieve equality by condemning a lot of kids to an “education” they can’t use.

We have let political correctness and good intentions get us crosswise to reality; and it is costing us. It has already cost a significant fraction of a generation. How many more will we feed into this maw?

Teach Your Child To Read

Probably the best preparation you can give kids for the current education system is to make sure they can read – and by read I mean read, not just controlled vocabulary books, but “big words” like Constantinople and Timbuktu, and polyethylene and oxygendihydride – before the school system gets hold of them. My wife long ago developed a program, originally for DOS, that does that in 70 1/2 hour lessons. It works. If you’re interested go to http://www.readingtlc.com/ and see. Of course good readers do not “sound out” words once they have learned them; but they need the ability when they encounter words they have never seen before, particularly if they have already had the word read to them in stories. But you knew that.

My thanks to all who have subscribed or renewed in the past several weeks. I have a large number of those I haven’t processed; I’m dancing as fast as I can and I clean up a pile of them each day. It’s work I do when I run out of creative energy. Apologies, and again, thanks: your subscriptions not only make this place possible, but let me work on important matters.

Lynn Margulis, RIP   http://www.chelseagreen.com/content/lynn-margulis/ 

I did not know her well, and I doubt she would remember me, but I did a few reports on her lectures back when I did general science reporting and was science editor of Galaxy. She was an absolutely first class lecturer, and it was always a pleasure to interview her. I once signed a book for her, which I was greatly flattered to do. By the time I met her she was no longer married to Carl Sagan. I haven’t seen her for twenty years. May she rest in peace. She sure could do lectures!

View 703 Monday, November 28, 2011

I had a number of panels at LOSCON this weekend. One was a 20^th Anniversary consideration of FALLEN ANGELS by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn. There’s a Kindle Edition. I thought there was a print edition still available as a new book, but I haven’t found one, which is a bit of a surprise to me.

The Kindle edition is quite readable, but despite its appearance this isn’t a pitch to sell books. The premise of Fallen Angels was that climate is returning to the 100,000 year cooling cycle interrupted by the warming period that began ten to twenty thousand years ago.

Approximately every 100,000 years Earth’s climate warms up temporarily. These warm periods, called interglacial periods, appear to last approximately 15,000 to 20,000 years before regressing back to a cold ice age climate. At year 18,000 and counting our current interglacial vacation from the Ice Age is much nearer its end than its beginning.

Global warming during Earth’s current interglacial warm period has greatly altered our environment and the distribution and diversity of all life. For example:

Approximately 15,000 years ago the earth had warmed sufficiently to halt the advance of glaciers, and sea levels worldwide began to rise.

By 8,000 years ago the land bridge across the Bering Strait was drowned, cutting off the migration of men and animals to North America from Asia.

Since the end of the Ice Age, Earth’s temperature has risen approximately 16 degrees F and sea levels have risen a total of 300 feet! Forests have returned where once there was only ice.

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html

Something in the panel – Niven and me, with John Hertz as interviewer/moderator – got me thinking about the book Niven and I are doing. Then came another panel that got me thinking further along those lines, and this morning I saw reports of a New York Times article about Democratic Party strategy for the upcoming election, which in essence was to abandon the productive class in order to get all the votes of a coalition of the unproductive (those in need, on welfare, who want extension of unemployment, more food stamps, etc.) and Government Employees, teachers unions, and so forth. A different strategy to win political office that almost explicitly pits the unproductive against the productive in the name of fair play. This reminded me powerfully of Atlas Shrugged, and that got me thinking about the structure of our novel, and precisely what stories we want to tell in it (as with Hammer it’s a big multi-viewpoint novel). Of course this is an article by a party strategist.

Then Peter Flynn got me to do a long interview on the theme of ‘Why Science Fiction?’. I had to think on that. Why does science fiction exist, or why do I write it, or—. Anyway, one of the purposes of science fiction is warning; what Robert Heinlein called the “If this goes on—“ story. And of course it got me thinking about just why Niven and I are doing so much work on this book. No one but a blockhead writes except for money, but few writers including Dr. Johnson ever wrote just for money.

Then this morning I got this mail:

Climategate 2.0

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204452104577059830626002226.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Wonder how long it will take this house of cards to fall?

Phil

Of course I have a lot of mail on Climategate 2.0 but this came just as I was thinking about incentives for Atlas not merely to shrug but to get his gun. What happens after Atlas Shrugged? Anyway, that’s one reason why this place is just a bit sparse lately. Thanks to all of you who subscribed, and particularly my Patrons and Platinum Club members, I can take a day off to think about what stories Niven and I can tell.

Suppose the Ice is coming back, or there is credible evidence of it; and suppose that can be prevented, but it’s a long term project, not something you can do overnight. You’ll need – well, that’s part of the story. But what happens after Atlas shrugs?

I have the last of my diabetes control classes at Kaiser this afternoon, so I have to cut this short. When I get back I’ll put together a mailbag, and I owe BYTE and all of you a new Chaos Manor Reviews column, and great heavens, there’s no lack of things to use me energies, but one reason one writes is to have written – there’s considerable satisfaction in saying that’s done, ship it! – and I am way behind on it all. I thought I was dancing as fast as I can, but perhaps I can pick the pace just a bit more.

I see that the Mayor of LA gave the Occupy LA people a deadline of midnight last night to get off the public square, but they aren’t doing it. The regulators have declared much of their free food preparation effort illegal, which spills over to other charity operations such as very long standing soup kitchens and school bake sales; using regulators to do the job of riot police can cast a long shadow.

If no one believes in a republic, it will fall to someone who does believe in his cause. When people are weary and without hope, then perhaps they are ready for an Akbar or Charlemagne, if they are fortunate enough to find one. I wonder if anyone reads people like John Stuart Mill any longer? And of course in searching for Charlemagne they may find Fidel Castro.

We have apparently come down to protests over the right to protest, and victory consists of being able to stay on the public square. That’s victory? But now I have to sort through today’s mail, have lunch, and get out to Kaiser for my final class. More tonight.

I am reminded that I have not given the explanation of the Texas/Wisconsin education statistics seeming paradox. First thing tomorrow. It’s a good story, there’s no paradox at all (although one has to accept a politically incorrect fact to resolve it), and it will help me avoid getting into the Cain mess until we know whether there is any connection between the latest woman and Axelrod.

I posted this Thursday. This is a repeat:

I will give you one fact to ponder over the weekend.

Some Teachers Unions have pointed out that the average grade and high school performances in Wisconsin, which has teachers unions, are higher than the corresponding averages in Texas, which is a right to work state. This is true. The average student performance in Wisconsin is higher than the average student performance in Texas.

It is also true that the average black student performance in Texas is higher than black student performance in Wisconsin. The average Hispanic student performance in Texas is higher than the average Hispanic student performance in Wisconsin. The average white (non-Latino) student performance in Texas is higher than the average white (non-Latino) student performance in Wisconsin. The three classes are collectively exhaustive.

These facts are true, and they are not contradictory although they may appear to be. We’ll talk more about this next week, but if you are moved to comment I’m listening.