Undead Astronauts

1. Both Newsweek and USNews released their annual best high school lists. Grissom ranks 623 and 804 respectively. Unfortunately, USNews this year failed to provide the same sorting features they did last year, so you can’t find a list of schools with high minority enrollment unless you make it yourself. Also unfortunately, their methodology rewards high non-Asian minority representation unlike Newsweek which doesn’t look at race and is therefore more strictly meritocratic. Newsweek’s weakness is that they only looked at a fraction of the schools that USNews did – something like 2000 compared to 22,000.

2. More PISA analysis that delves into how much immigrant populations affect PISA scores and national IQ. For most nations, the effect is unfortunately negative. Noticeable exceptions are some middle eastern nations like Qatar and Dubai where the immigrants far outscore the natives. The differences are so stark that I wonder if they’ll soon develop market dominant minorities along with all its consequences. 2nd generation scores also differ, and show that some countries with elitist high IQ immigration laws like Singapore and Australia have kids that get better scores than natives. Singapore’s results are interesting in particular because of Lee Kuan Yew’s opinions on race realism and the fact that he tailored his immigration policies in part based on those beliefs.

3. This graphic makes me thirsty. Head here for the math.

1. Tyrese tweeted this msg yesterday: “Ladies and Gentleman proud to say we just closed our K-Town Deal!! Who and what is K-town?? I’m glad you asked standby..” So K-town is going to happen. Let the debauchery, histrionics and shamelessness begin!
2. The Huntsville a capella group Committed has won The Sing Off. Catch their performances here.
3. Steve Sailer put up a graph of how the 4 major US ethnic groups did on PISA compared to the rest of the world. Asian Americans outscore every nation, but are still behind the Shanghai kids.

so the PISA scores which compare 15 yr olds in 65 different countries came out today, and shanghai earned the top spot in all sections (including reading). it would be a no brainer to predict shanghai would be very high, but it’s a bit eyebrow raising that they’re #1. the first thing that i would have thought is sampling bias introduced by gov’t direction, but international experts oversaw the testing and made sure the sample reflected the general school population of shanghai. that’s pretty interesting b/c steve hsu says, “this means that the top 10 percent of Shanghai math students are all above the 99th percentile for the US.”

some commentators in the US had already positioned the PISA test avgs as irrelevant b/c even though the US avg is low, it has 25% of the highest scoring students in the world b/c of uneven score distribution and it’s large population. but this was before the actual scores came out showing shanghai’s placement. even though shanghai is not representative of china as a whole, i’m guessing ppl here in the US are going to be less sanguine about this result if only b/c china is at the top. considering china’s population and the scores of shanghai students, suddenly maybe the US’s percentage of the highest scoring students isn’t quite what they thought it was.

the article mentions that shanghai students typically spend less time on non-academic activities, which may explain the scores. i wonder if flare could provide some insight. if chinese students play fewer sports, could a large portion of that time simply be swapped for gaming?

the interactive database w/ scores and student variables is here.