I was working at home in my office upstairs when Ethan and Jessie came home from school. Ethan soon figured that he’d left his bookbag in the car and he told Jessie:

    I am gonna ask daddy to get my bag.

Jessie:

    Why don’t you go get the bag and I will tell daddy.

Ethan said ok and went to the garage, with Jessie and I chuckling behind. 

Never mind what Health News 4 is promoting (or how I got there). I am just fascinated by how honest their small prints are — they tell you that the story, pictures, and comments are (possibly) fake. What about the icons at the top of their page? 

It is important to note that this site and the stories depicted above is to be used as an illustrative example of what some individuals have achieved with this/these products. This website, and any page on the website, is based loosely off a true story, but has been modified in multiple ways including, but not limited to: the story, the photos, and the comments. Thus, this blog, and any page on this website, are not to be taken literally or as a non-fiction story. This blog, and the results mentioned on this blog, although achievable for some, are not to be construed as the results that you may achieve on the same routine. I UNDERSTAND THIS WEBSITE IS ONLY ILLUSTRATIVE OF WHAT MIGHT BE ACHIEVABLE FROM USING THIS/THESE PRODUCTS, AND THAT THE STORY DEPICTED ABOVE IS NOT TO BE TAKEN LITERALLY. This page receives compensation for clicks on or purchase of products featured on this site.

Google Lab’s newest toy, Script Converter, looks pretty interesting, although I have no idea how to read the "Indian scripts" in the output. 

NAEP Studies - State Mapping

Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scales: 2005-2007

October 2009

Authors: Victor Bandeira de Mello, Charles Blankenship, Don McLaughlin

 Download the complete report in a PDF file for viewing and printing. (2985K PDF)

---

Executive Summary

Since 2003, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has sponsored the development of a method for mapping each state’s standard for proficient performance onto a common scale—the achievement scale of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). When states’ standards are placed onto the NAEP reading or mathematics scales, the level of achievement required for proficient performance in one state can then be compared with the level of achievement required in another state. This allows one to compare the standards for proficiency across states.

The mapping procedure offers an approximate way to assess the relative rigor of the states’ adequate yearly progress (AYP) standards established under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Once mapped, the NAEP scale equivalent score representing the state’s proficiency standards can be compared to indicate the relative rigor of those standards. The term rigor as used here does not imply a judgment about state standards. Rather, it is intended to be descriptive of state-to-state variation in the location of the state standards on a common metric. 

 

One interesting question here is the discrepancy between "proficiency" by the state standard and that by the NAEP standard. Pulling data from the above PDF file and here, here are the data:

In other words, there is little systematic relationship between the two "proficiency" measures. This is puzzling until I threw in a moderating variable — the state proficiency standard as measured in the NAEP scale. The following figure separates StateStandard versus StateProficiency% and StateStandard versus NAEPProficiency%. 

The dark blue dots are reported State proficiency %s. The top trendline tells the story: The more stringent the state’s standard, the less likely students will pass the proficiency test, and hence a negative relation is suspected. But this is not the whole story. The Pink spots are for the comparison the NAEP proficiency standard and the State standard. Now there is a small but (should be) significant finding — the more stringent the state curriculum is, the MORE students are proficient by the NAEP standard. 

Behavioral and Brian Sciences upcoming article: 

Target Article: "The Weirdest People in the World?"
Authors: Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan

Deadline for proposals: November 19, 2009

Abstract (short):  Broad claims about human psychology and behavior based on narrow samples from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies are regularly published in leading journals.  Are such species-generalizing claims justified?  This review suggests not only that substantial variability in experimental results emerges across populations in basic domains, but that WEIRD subjects are in fact rather unusual compared with the rest of the species-frequent outliers.  The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, categorization, spatial cognition, memory, moral reasoning and self-concepts.  This review (1) indicates caution in addressing questions of human nature based on this thin slice of humanity, and (2) suggests that understanding human psychology will require tapping broader subject pools.  We close by proposing ways to address these challenges.

Keywords: external validity, population variability, experiments, cross-cultural research, culture, human universals, generalizability, evolutionary psychology, cultural psychology, behavioral economics.

Download target article pre-print:

http://journals.cambridge.org/BBSJournal/Call/Henrich_Preprint

NY Times reports that Disney, the current parent of Baby Einstein, acknowledges the uselessness of the video series. For years I have been using this as an example of commercialization of child development in my developmental psych course. I had come to accept it as a fact of life, but this news gives hope.

Hat tip to Pam, a student from the 2008 class. 

Last Friday, Ethan, 6, weighed himself in the YMCA locker room and announced excitedly "I am 47lb!"

"I am 147lb," I said.

"Some pumpkins are 2000lbs, you know", he snapped back.

NY Times published an article online on Sept 10 (according to the website, a version of this article appeared in print on September 11, 2009, on page A15 of the New York edition) titled Heckler’s District Mostly Supports the Outburst, in which the reporters cited 5 interviewees in support of Joe Wilson’s shouting "You lie!" during President Obama’s health speech. They are:

1. "Yeah, it was rude, but somebody needed to say it," said Susan Wahl, 41, a homemaker in this town of 800 outside Columbia.

2. "I kind of want to defend Representative Wilson," said Mendel Lindler, 63, an insurance salesman in Lexington
3. Michelle Malkin, a blogger, said Mr. Wilson, who was previously known mainly for backing the Iraq war, had nothing to apologize for
4. "Give Obama hell," said Bob Allen, 52, a construction worker in Columbia
5. Marie Briggs, 77, a retiree from Sumter, which is in a different district, said, "I guess you would say it was a mite disrespectful, but I say, ‘All the way.’ "

1. "His behavior was inappropriate," said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader. [but this guy is not from SC]

2. "This shows people that South Carolina is closed-minded," said Omar Bates, 29, a West Columbia construction worker. "It makes the state look disrespectful." [the lone SC’ian …]

Aides to Mr. Wilson said his office on Capitol Hill received what may have been thousands of telephone calls on Thursday, which they estimated were supportive of the congressman by a margin of three to one.

Very bad statistics. I will leave it to my students to find out how bad it is.

But if you follow the link to the article provided above, you will find that the title has been changed as of today, to In Heckler’s District, Support for the Outburst. That is, the word "mostly" is removed. How can I prove this? Get on ABC News’ The Notes page and see for yourself:

The New York Times’ Robbie Brown and Carl Hulse: “Heckler’s District Mostly Supports the Outburst” LINK

I suspect NYT editors were either smart enough to realize the bias, or they have had an earful of complaints. But does the change of the title changed the semantics? 

Alliance for Childhood‘s report Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School does not seem to provide data on 2 critical questions: (a) how have the American kindergartens changed, and (b) why kindergarten?

It was a bit of a let down, after the introduction claimed that US kindergartens have gone through drammatic changes, to not being able to find a figure or a table in support.

It is also disappointing that the few references to k programs in other contries — Germany, China, and Japan — were vague and rosy. As far as I know, "kindergartens" (You4 Er2 Yuan2, literally young children’s garden) in China are actually the equivalent of the preschools in the US, and they are indeed play-oriented. The "pre-school" (Xue2 Qian2 Ban1, literally before school class), on the other hand, is often part of an elementary school, much like the K classrooms in the US, and is a lot more formal. 

The report tells us that kids today don’t have much time for free play at home, and kindergartens are not structured to support certain types of play. But that does not seem to imply that kindergarten classrooms are necessarily the right place to make up the lost play time. 

The bottom line, it seems, should be whether kids today have suffered in their ability to enjoy play (according to the report schools are busy taking care of the academics). To this end the most memorable "evidence" from the report, based on my quick reading, is the quote from a teacher who said children today don’t know how to play even if they were given the time. I am sure I have said the same thing about my kids. So did my folks. 

Being a non-native speaker of English, I wonder about the name of BBC’s World Have Your Say – why "have"? Is "world" plural? Or is this imperative? "World has your say" clearly sounds bad, but can anybody tell me why?

I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom to manage/edit raw photo files from my Nikon D80. With my pictures spreat to a number of computers, I have recently adopted a recommended strategy to consolidate Lightroom catelogs to an external hard drive so that I can open the pictures on any computer.

After exporting a whole catelog from computer A, I connected the drive to computer B. Fired up Lightroom, and got the following error trying to open the LRCAT file on the external drive. 

Google Gears and Notebook disabled by Firefox 3.5, along with many useful extensions such as Book Burro and the LibX. Here’s a quick and dirty way to revive some of them, via the Nightly Tester Tools extension

After installing the NTT, go to add-ons, and click the "override all compatibility" button at the bottom right, and restart the browser. Nothing exploded on my computer, but proceed at your own risk.

At least I can confirm that Google Notebook and Book Burro (appear to) work. Tom at Duke Library fixed the Duke version of LibX a moment ago so I can’t tell. But, alas, Google Gears and other gmail-enhancers don’t.

Ethan, my 5 year brother, was asked to fetch the newspaper this morning. 

"Oh, brother!" he cried.

"You don’t have a brother,"I teased.

"Yes I do, I am a brother!" he said matter of factedly.  

– guest post by Jessie 

Like many smart kids, Ethan, 4 at the time, sometimes had to be corrected for grammar.

"hey, Ethan, do you say he do or he does?" I hinted.

"He do what he does." he said matter-of-factedly.

Picking among his favorite pants and shorts this morning, Ethan, 5, proclaimed

"I like life because it is interesting. "

Ethan will be 6 in less than a month, and boy, hasn’t he grown intellectually and spiritually.

Yesterday was the last day of school and he came home early. By early afternoon I found him lying on the floor, bored. Then he turn to me and said:

"Dad, you know, you can’t really do nothing. Like I am doing nothing, but I am still lying here."

And just now he was asked to do a chore and he exclaimed "Oh, brother!"

"But you don’t even have a brother," I teased.

"Dad, oh brother means oh my god," he tried to explain. Then a second later he added, thoughtfully,

"Brother means god."

Relaying the Duke Library Hacks blog post on Publish or Perish

Joining this group is Publish or Perish, with a slightly different take on this process.  Publish or Perish uses data from Google Scholar, but it automatically does analysis on the citation patterns for specific authors.  After searching for an author (works best with first initial and quotes, such as “DG Schaeffer”) you can select the papers you want to analyze and you get metrics such as total citations, cites per year, h-index, g-index, etc.  Any analysis done can be exported to EndNote, BibTeX or a CSV file.

The software is available for Windows and Linux and is a quick, light, free download from the Publish or Perish website.  It’s more of a do-one-thing-well software and isn’t full of features, but this makes it easy to use.  It was created by an Australian professor and she includes some thoughts on her site about GoogleScholar as a citation tool as well as an explanation of the metrics used in the software.

You do your normal lit search, and AuthorMapper shows where the authors are on google map.  That’s one of the things on my procrastination to-do list. They did a very good job, including multi-resolution icon representations that, for example, shows an icon for the whole North East US region when you are at a world view, and splits it as you zoom in.

There is a catch — apparently it only searches the Springer database, which, according to its About page: 

Springer is the second-largest publisher of journals in the science, technology, and medicine (STM) sector and the largest publisher of STM books.

When it comes to literature research, the second largest means you are missing a world.

Data.gov can be handy in the stat course I will be teaching in the Fall.  

Seriously, I found this word — unincluded — in a Ph. D. dissertation draft.

… and five 5-year-olds, who were unincluded due to reading ability. 

It was not a joke, at least I wouldn’t find it funny in the middle of the Method section. And no, the author is a native English speaker.

The "word" has, as of today, about 10K gHits, and taking out those related to the band Unincluded, unincluded -lundell there are about 9K. Pretty rare.