Why Dont You Blog?

What hope do the children have?

In the UK we suffer a very bad obsession with league tables in which the performance of every public body is graded (on an arbitrary scale) and compared against others - rarely in a like for like but that is another matter.

As you can imagine, schools bear the brunt of this. Parents are understandably determined to get their children the best education possible, often moving across the country to be in the catchment area of their chosen school. Most of this one-upmanship is derived from the school tables, helpfully published on the BBC website.

All the trust has to be placed in what ever body is responsible for collecting these numbers. Are they up to the task?

Idly surfing the web, I came upon this educational report on the BBC. It is the stats for an infants/primary school (ages 3 - 11) in Shrewsbury. All normal. Have a look at the stats and it seems like its a reasonably good school - it performs above the average for its educational authority, which is also above the average nationally.

Then have a look at this:

PERFORMANCE
37 eligible, 18.9% of whom had special educational needs

At first glance it seems normal and slightly low compared to some schools.

Then look at the numbers.

18.9% of 37 is 6.993.

This means that 6.993 students have special educational needs. How is that possible? Is this just a rounding problem? No, because 7 pupils would be 19% in any normal formulation.

Either the organisation who collates the stats is mathematically challenged, or they have massaged the numbers to make it look lower than it is (and are ethically challenged).

Whichever it is, how much faith can you have in this system?

Popularity: 10% [?]

Popularity: 10% [?]

Five days ago I talked about the odd statistics which were showing up in my BOINC client for Einstein@Home. Sadly in the intervening five days, nothing has become any clearer.

Now, the BOINC client has been running constantly (with the exception of one 9 hour period) for the last five days, yet the increase seems minimal and the average is plummeting like a stone. Looking at the client stats page there are still 82 work units “pending” credit (at around 53.4 credits per unit) so eventually this should change.

Even so, I am still not sure how the two sets of numbers compare to each other. I cant work out how the averages are calculated at all. Any comments welcome.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Popularity: 23% [?]

I am far from an expert on these subjects, but it covers something which has been intriguing me over the last few days. The Einstein@HOME program is described as follows:

Einstein@Home is a program that uses your computer’s idle time to search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors. Einstein@Home is a World Year of Physics 2005 project supported by the American Physical Society (APS)and by a number of international organizations.

(A bit like Seti@Home but that seems to have lost some popularity of late)

Now this is a nice bit of software which runs from something called the BOINC manager, where you can get to view your current work unit, see stats, visit the forums etc.

The question I have, is about the “user statistics” it shows. As you can see in the screen shots, there is choice of “user total” or “user average” and to me, the two don’t seem to match up. I am led to believe the average is “recent average” rather than a simple (total / days) type. But even so, it seems odd - especially as I have had the software running almost constantly for little or no return in the way of work units.

Any feedback or commentary welcome. Given the steady climb shown by the total figures, the mountain-like averages seem somewhat… odd.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Popularity: 23% [?]

Now, it seems I was a touch hasty with my last post on gun crime and statistics. If I had spent more time reading the comments on the Deltoid post even more comedy bad-statistical goodness would have come to light.

As someone living outside the US, I have no real concept of how this is an issue which creates such a furore. I am dimly aware of the constitutional issues, but as far as I can tell the right to bear arms was there because the founding fathers didn’t believe in a standing army. I don’t think they envisaged a future where both would happen, but who am I to know.

The main pro-gun comments seem to come from a guy called “ben” who proudly proclaims “I pack heat” and while superficially sound, they don’t seem to survive detailed analysis. For example, the numerous studies which have linked gun ownership to homicide are disproven by a the apparent fact that the homicide rate in gun-carrying Seattle is lower than in gun-banned Vancouver. Interesting. I think it is important to highlight that the debate is about “homicide” not “gun crime” which is a mistake I have made in the past.

While it is entirely possible that the apparently obvious more guns = more crime assumption is wrong, this leads to more questions which could have interesting conclusions. If more guns != more crime, then why does the nation with the highest incidence of gun ownership have more crimes per person than other nations? Are God-fearing Americans simply more criminally minded than (say) Canadians?

Popularity: 25% [?]

Popularity: 25% [?]

Sorry about this, it’s not ground-breakingly brilliant but it’s entertaining. There is something good about having a mathematician and his physicist not-quite girlfriend as the relatively glamourous heros of a cop show. This makes a change from scientists always being portrayed as total geeks.

There is an odd physicist as well - the short guy from Ally McBeal - but there are odd non-scientists - liek the man who used too be the central character in Taxi. The programme doesn’t necessarily assume that having mathematical skills makes you a social outcast, which is nice.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Popularity: 12% [?]