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It is clear to everybody that if you solve a crossword puzzle, then you must also have the ability to do so. But the reverse conclusion is rather inane. If you do not solve it, it does not follow that you cannot solve it at all, in the sense that you completely and utterly lack the natural prerequisites for doing so. It just means that you did not solve it yet. So if you learn the principles of crossword puzzles – and maybe some foreign words and the names of a couple of ancient Norse and Greek gods – you will probably be able to solve them the next time.
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it is no wonder that extended school attendance leads to a higher “IQ score” and that the lack of schooling leads to a score at the level of the mentally retarded.
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This is a fact that the IQ theorists do not really like: They are not only very well aware of the fact that you can easily improve your faculties for solving IQ tests and thus gain a higher score, it is also common knowledge to them that the average population in industrial countries with regular schooling, as already mentioned, has become no less than 30 percent better at filling out IQ tests in the course of the 20th century.
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This is a bit of a wonky and technical post on an important debate over how we measure innovation, and in fact, what innovation actually means in the economy. Much of the debate over innovation in manufacturing has focused on the notion of productivity defined as a measure of the ratio of inputs to outputs. This is all well and good, but how should we define inputs and outputs? By their quantity? Their weight? Their color? Or perhaps economic value? If so, should that value be adjusted for price changes over time?
The Information Technology and Information Foundation and a few others argues for the importance of using quantity as a metrics of manufacturing output, whereas most economics prefer to use economic value. Which measure makes more sense?
Supposedly students in Singapore are assessed with national tests every two years. Concurrently a teacher is assigned a class every two years. While some students will always come and go there will be a cohort of students who do not change over the two years. The normed average grades of those two years can then be measured and the percentage improvement (or decline) noted. Working on the famous Greek principle that victory has many generals but defeat is an orphan, the relative movement in the class average is deemed to be reflective of the quality of teaching the students have received. Not only that but the relative improvement can then be assessed against similar results for all the peers of the teacher for that year. Supposedly the top ten per cent of the Singaporean teachers are given substantial performance bonuses and earmarked for future promotion while the bottom ten percent are counselled and effectively told that if similar results occur again that they should look to another career besides teaching.
The silence of the Australians was by now deafening.
The Singaporeans then went on to point that before this system was introduced the best teachers would always try and get the best students because they could then brag about how many students they had in top 1000 performers etc. Now the best teachers would try and get the worst performing classes so they could get the greatest improvement. Thus the worst classes would get the best teachers and in that way the whole country's education system was lifted.
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a major key to his success was to ensure that everyone in his organisation was measured on some objective performance indicator and each year replace the bottom ten per cent.
Singapore’s government, known to be meticulous planners, have responded to the index’s results, which they say are “biased against import-dependent, land-scarce, densely populated countries such as Singapore,” which by their nature and geographic location must rely heavily on imported resources like food and gas.
“As a city-state, it would have been more relevant if Singapore was benchmarked against other cities, which typically are also import-dependent for energy, food and water, rather than countries,” said a spokesperson from the country’s Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources.
Competitiveness is a holistic concept. While economic size and growth are important and necessary, several other factors help determine a city’s competitiveness as well. For the purposes of this research, we define competitiveness as a city’s demonstrated ability to attract capital, businesses, talent and visitors.
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Singapore is the most competitive city in Asia and third globally after New York and London, out of 120 of the world’s major cities, according to a new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). The research, Hot Spots: Benchmarking Global City Competitiveness, was commissioned by Citi and is available for download here.
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Efforts to position Singapore as a leading global city are paying off. Singapore performs extremely well on six of the eight categories of competitiveness: economic strength, institutional effectiveness, financial maturity, global appeal, physical capital, and environment and natural hazards
Singapore has managed to combine the economic dynamism of the emerging world—it was one of only six developed cities in the top 20 for “economic strength”—with the livability and “softer” elements of competitiveness that are more the hallmark of some Western developed cities.
Less than 50 years since independence, it is admirable that Singapore can hold its own alongside much older, more established cities such as New York and London, when it comes to attracting capital, businesses, talent and visitors.
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A year after the Fukushima reactor catastrophe, we can start to estimate its effects on people’s medical and mental health. Curiously, it’s the mental impact that we can predict best. As a recent Green Blog post by Matthew Wald explained, the medical effects are expected to be too weak and widely dispersed to measure. According to one theory, the increased radiation received by hundreds of thousands of citizens will cause an increase in their cancer rate — but an increase too tiny to detect amid the large number of cancers that will occur anyway. According to a rival theory, radiation at these low levels will cause scarcely any cancers at all. Scientists just don’t know.
The psychological impact, however, is plain. Precisely because damage from very-low-level radiation cannot be detected, people exposed to it are left in anguished uncertainty. Many believe they have been fundamentally contaminated for life. They may refuse to have children for fear of birth defects. They may be shunned by others who fear a sort of mysterious contagion.
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Such great psychological danger does not accompany other materials that put people at risk of cancer and other deadly illness. Visceral fear is not widely aroused by, for example, the daily emissions from coal burning, although, as a National Academy of Sciences study found, this causes 10,000 premature deaths a year among Americans. It is only nuclear radiation that bears a huge psychological burden — for it carries a unique historical legacy.
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To be sure, people knew that nuclear energy had a good side. Already in the 1950s, radiation therapy was saving lives by the million. But thoughts of “good atoms” were overwhelmed by the terrors of the Cold War. Outcries against bomb tests focused on the radioactive materials they spread around the world on the winds. Debates over fallout shelters offered an image of a dead planet scourged by radioactive dust. In short, fear of nuclear war drove home images of radiation as an insidious contamination that was uniquely deadly on a global scale.
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"18 of the 20 outlets were left of center. The only two that were not were the Washington Times and Fox News’ Special Report with Brit Hume.
Our findings, however, contradicted a few claims of conservatives. For instance, they showed that some mainstream news outlets are nearly perfectly centrist, albeit still left-leaning. Two were ABC’s Good Morning America and [PBS's] The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. Also, we found that many supposedly far-left news outlets were not that far left. For instance, we found that National Public Radio was no more liberal than the Washington Post, Time, or Newsweek. And we found that it was less liberal than the average speech by Senator Joe Lieberman...
Our study was denounced by hundreds, and maybe thousands, of left-wing blogs, including Media Matters, the Daily Kos, and the Huffington Post. At one point if you googled “crap UCLA study,” most of the first ten listings would refer to our study...
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The chairs of the departments of sociology, religion, and German and Russian languages were especially angry, and they called it “offensive” and “scandalous.” One said “The study isn’t research. It’s agitprop for the conservative blogosphere.”
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… In that lay part of my objection, and here I have to say that it’s not to your work qua research at all. Rather, its presentation on the website made a pretty categorical claim about bias that taps into a charged political environment. There are difficult issues that underpin the website headline, and your study is complex and sophisticated enough to treat many of them; far more subtle and nuanced than the journalistic reductio. There are of course issues outstanding or open to discussion (what’s included by way of news sources, whether conceptual categories like liberal and conservative have veridical legitimacy as identity markers, where and how one designates boundaries of same [i.e., you can call something X and cite as reason a widely accepted standard, but that in no way means that the thing really is X, or so a philosopher would say], how one categorizes constellations of dispositions, how one treats what Bakhtin called dialogism in discourse analysis, and so forth. …
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it appears that there is a quite significant hole in the National Accounting (and thus the GDP statistics) around Internet related activities since most of this accounting is concerned with measuring the production and distribution of tangible products and the associated services. For the most part the available numbers don’t include many Internet (or “social capital” e.g. in health and education) related activities as they are linked to intangible outputs. The significance of not including social capital components in the GDP has been widely discussed elsewhere. The significance (and potential remediation) of the absence of much of the Internet related activities was the subject of the workshop.
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there had been a series of critiques of GDP statistics from Civil Society (CS) over the last few years—each associated with a CS “movements—the Woman’s Movement and the absence of measurement of “women’s (and particularly domestic) work”; the Environmental Movement and the absence of the longer term and environmental costs of the production of the goods that the GDP so blithely counts as a measure of national economic well-being; and most recently with the Sustainability Movement, and the absence of measures reflective of the longer term negative effects/costs of resource depletion and environmental degradation. What I didn’t see anywhere apart from the background discussions to the OECD workshop itself were critiques reflecting issues related to the Internet or ICTs.
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The Flynn effect has always been tinged with mystery. First popularized by the political scientist James Flynn, the effect refers to the widespread increase in IQ scores over time. Some measures of intelligence — such as performance on Raven’s Progressive Matrices in Des Moines and Scotland — have been increasing for at least 100 years. What’s most peculiar is how scores have increased:
1) Scores have increased the most on the problem-solving portion of intelligence tests.
2) Verbal intelligence has remained relatively flat, while non-verbal scores continue to rise.
3) Performance gains have occurred across all age groups.
4) The rise in scores exists primarily on those tests with content that does not appear to be easily learned.
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While one might assume that IQ scores could increase over time in terms of crystallized intelligence — the part of the test that measures particular kinds of knowledge, such as being able to count or vocabulary words — it’s actually increased on measures of fluid intelligence, which is the ability to solve abstract problems. This has led some psychologists, such as Ian Dreary, to conclude that “large differences in scores [between generations] are demonstrated in just those situations where similarity would be expected.” Flynn, meanwhile, marveled at the magical constancy of the effect: “It’s as if some unseen hand is propelling scores upward,” he wrote.
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. In recent years, many psychologists have embraced the “multiplicity hypothesis” which argues that the Flynn effect is explained by a long list of factors, such as improvements in early education (especially for girls), removal of lead paint, increased sophistication of tests, better test taking attitudes and adequate nutrition.
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As with healthcare and other valuable services, police work costs money; but as the cost is not borne by the user, the true cost is hidden and abuse occurs. Does this study by the SPF signal a desire on the part of the government to shift the cost of security from the public to the direct consumers? I certainly hope so. Now there will be people who will tell you that you cannot put a price on security (and health) - the truth is, you can: they just don't want to pay for it.
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The study aims to calculate the costs incurred as a consequence of crime, which includes "monetary loss in traditional terms" and "monetising the loss of life and trauma suffered by victims".
Costs of crime prevention and enforcement will also be tallied. The study seeks to find out costs borne by private entities - such as security expenditure and insurance - as well as costs borne by public bodies such as proactive police patrols in anticipation of crime.The police also intend to calculate the costs incurred in response to crime - investigating cases, apprehending suspects as well as the costs expended by the State in prosecuting, convicting and incarcerating suspects. -
While costs of crime prevention - such as installing alarm systems - and the State's response to crime could be measured, sociologist Paulin Straughan felt it might be "impossible" to measure the social costs of a spate of violence on a community. Social isolation and mistrust from these crimes would impact social capital on a community which would be difficult to estimate, she argued.
However, the former Nominated Member of Parliament felt calculating the cost of crime would serve as "a reality check" for any society. - 1 more annotation(s)...
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The INES scale is an internationally agreed-upon standard. Signatory nations are themselves responsible for interpreting the scale and assigning numbers to their own incidents. There is not a single international body that does this. Indeed, from the INES web site:
What the Scale is Not For
It is not appropriate to use INES to compare safety performance between facilities, organizations or countries. The statistically small numbers of events at Level 2 and above and the differences between countries for reporting more minor events to the public make it inappropriate to draw international comparisons. -
the INES number is not a “threat level”. It’s a rough assessment of the scale of a mess that has been created. It does not portend coming danger, it characterizes an incident.
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No one knows exactly why the international prototype of the kilogram, as pampered a hunk of platinum and iridium as ever existed, appears to weigh less than it did when it was manufactured in the late 19th century.
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No one knows exactly why the international prototype of the kilogram, as pampered a hunk of platinum and iridium as ever existed, appears to weigh less than it did when it was manufactured in the late 19th century.
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It is here that the kilogram — the universal standard against which all other kilograms are measured — resides in controlled conditions set out in 1889, in an underground vault that can be opened only with three different keys possessed by three different people.
The change, discovered when the prototype was compared with its official copies, amounts only to some 50 micrograms, equal to the mass of a smallish grain of sand. But it shows that the prototype has fallen down on its primary job, to be a beacon of stability in a world of uncertainty.
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The truth is not all screening tests are equal, and more importantly, even when a screening test is accurate (yes, I chose to use this term because I am lazy) and we are able "determine the health condition of an individual", it did not necessarily mean that it was cost-effective to screen the population at large, or indeed a specific patient. Unfortunately, if someone was in a position that "the costs of these tests are a big burden" to him or her, an accurate diagnosis may just be the beginning of more financial burden...
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The truth is not all screening tests are equal, and more importantly, even when a screening test is accurate (yes, I chose to use this term because I am lazy) and we are able "determine the health condition of an individual", it did not necessarily mean that it was cost-effective to screen the population at large, or indeed a specific patient. Unfortunately, if someone was in a position that "the costs of these tests are a big burden" to him or her, an accurate diagnosis may just be the beginning of more financial burden...
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But the cost-effectiveness of screening tests are really quite a technical issue that we cannot expect laymen (or even all doctors) to understand - that's not what bothered me about this letter. What bothered me was how a layman can think that a bunch of doctors and statisticians sitting in MOH can be blind to the benefits of "all cancer screenings as well as all tests to detect heart disease", which are so obvious to him.
the lack of standards for everything from weights and measures to electricity — even the gallon, for example, had eight definitions — threatened to overwhelm industry and consumers with a confusing array of incompatible choices.
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LAST week Michele Bachmann, a Republican representative from Minnesota, introduced a bill to roll back efficiency standards for light bulbs, which include a phasing out of incandescent bulbs in favor of more energy-efficient bulbs. The “government has no business telling an individual what kind of light bulb to buy,” she declared.
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But this opposition ignores another, more important bit of American history: the critical role that government-mandated standards have played in scientific and industrial innovation.
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