links for 2009-03-12

"Virtually none of the recipients of the DC voucher program could go to Sidwell Friends like Barack Obamaâs kids. For one thing, they couldnât get in. And for another thing, they couldnât come close to affording the tuition. But the former point is actually more fundamental. Elite schoolsâbe they colleges, high schools, or whateverâare largely in the business of selecting their own students. Sidwell has a lot of interest in having Barack Obamaâs kids as students. Sidwell has virtually no interest in having your typical disadvantaged, low-achieving kid as a student. "

A look at the (supposed) transcript of the original Raiders of the Lost Ark story meeting, and what it can tell you about the art of screenwriting. Somehow, I doubt they'll be doing this for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull...

"Several universities such as Towson and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which are known as "traditionally white" but now enroll substantial numbers of African-American students, have reduced their achievement gaps to near zero. But the state's historically black universities have struggled to graduate their students. These schools typically have lower admissions standards and must provide many students with remedial classes.

Coppin State University in Baltimore has the lowest rate. Only 17 percent of freshmen in 2002 graduated by last year - Coppin's lowest figure since the system began collecting data in 1989. A decade ago, Coppin's graduation rate was 26 percent."

"Some are still under the impression that this is just another blog, that I'm sitting at home and ranting about mid-major basketball from my couch. That is definitely not the case. TMM Mobile HQ is very real, and has already logged over 22,000 miles and over 90 games this season. Put that in your parents' basement and smoke it."

"[T]he atmosphere in a typical physics department is nothing like the stereotypical Liar's Poker trading floor that Drum is alluding to. To the extent that the environment I work in is like academia, it's because I'm lucky enough to work with a group run by ex-academics rather than people with a typical trader's background. Instead, what Drum calls the "affinity theory" really is the right one. The work I do now is a lot like the problems I worked on as a physicist. It's not just (as Drum suggests) about math; it's about the ability to work with huge data sets and make sense of them, and to find signals in a noisy system. This is a much bigger factor than testosterone levels. "

"Weâre launching a very cool new project at Berkman today, Media Cloud. Basically, Media Cloud is a platform to help researchers find quantitative answers to questions like:

- What type of stories are covered more heavily in blogs than in newspapers?
- How does coverage of a topic like Iran differ between national newspapers, local newspapers and political blogs?
- How much overlap in coverage do two news sources have? If youâre reading the New York Times and the Boston Globe, how much topical difference do the sources have?
- How do news stories move between bloggers and mainstream journalists? How common or infrequent is it that bloggers âbreakâ stories or introduce new analytic frames?"

More data, still no strong relationship between price and impact factor

"We know full well that verbal and visual reasoning in the population are distributed normally, and this is highly reproduceable. In some individuals, these reasoning abilities may trend together, but they don't have to. They measure these abilities with IQ tests, and these tests are among the most accurate and repeatable psychological tests. If we know that people can reason better in some ways rather than others, doesn't it follow that they may learn better based on these abilities as well?"