Problems in reporting high school dropout rates

I first saw FlowingData mention a display to call attention to the insanely high number of high school dropouts.  It says 857 per hour.  Wow.  Do they really mean in the U.S. alone?  That would be 7.5 million per year, or more than the entire class of seniors.  That can't be right.  Well, according to the New York Times report, it's "every single hour, every single school day".... ah, that's getting closer to real numbers, and according to the College Board's own page on the installation, it's "More than 1.2 million students drop out of school every year, which averages out to 6,000 students every school day and 857 every hour".


Okay, that sounds better, but still not quite right.  The 2010 American Community Survey reports that 16.8% of 18-24 year-olds do not have a high school education (this number drops to 14.4% for the 25 and older population, presumably because some of those 18-20 year-olds eventually finish or get their GEDs).  That 18-24 year-old demographic constitutes about 10% of a 300 million person population, or very roughly 4.5 million people for each age category.  


The College Board wants us to equate the 1.2 million dropouts with people who never get a high school degree (or equivalent), but clearly that's not the case.  Some of those kids go back and get their degrees.  And, likely, some of those kids are going back and dropping out again, and getting counted twice, or three or more times.


A sixth of the adult population without a high school degree is bad enough without trying to make it 25% through shady accounting.  I'm a little surprised FlowingData didn't catch this (and worse, reported 857/hour without the "while school is in session" qualification).

Lymans everywhere

The local middle school is Hunt Middle School, or, more fully, Lyman C. Hunt Middle School.  I just discovered that Calahan Park** is more fully Lyman C. Calahan Park.  They've got to be related, right?  I mean, I know people with the last name Lyman, but Lyman as a first name feels like someone used a family surname, and for two prominent Lymans to be in a small town like Burlington, they probably had the same grandmother or great-grandmother, right?


Well, maybe not.  Turns out that Lyman was a reasonably popular name until it died out in the 50's.  That timing is also consistent with the age of Jon Arbuckle's roommate.  Poor Lyman.  I didn't even know he was dead.  




** yes, that looks like a typo to me, and to Google, too, which wants to know "did you mean callahan"?

Chronicle (2012)

We saw a movie the year in which it was released!  Wow, it came out in February, didn't bomb at the box office, and actually came in the mail shortly after it was released (unlike Sherlock and Game of Thrones, sitting on "very long wait", and demanding that we switch to the streaming model).  


This is basically the Professor X / Magneto story, but with not-so-introspective teenagers in Seattle.  Oh, and they threw in a token black guy to get killed so that the two white male leads would have something to feel really bad about.  Really?  REALLY?!  It's particularly galling because Steve has far more screen presence than Andrew or Mack/Matt/whatever-the-heck-his-name-is.  And if you thought we were supposed to feel sympathetic toward Magneto because his family was killed at Auschwitz, well, Andrew's mom is dying of cancer, and his dad is an ex-firefighter who collects disability, gets drunk at 8 in the morning, and beats Andrew.  And he's also the least cool kid in school and gets picked on by everyone (maybe they've lifted a little Peter Parker, too).  So, aside from the hackneyed plot and weak character development (though I shouldn't complain too much -- there actually was some character development!), we did have fun watching this. 

Sharing everywhere

I can finally easily share blog posts on Google+! Of course, that was ... back in December. How did I miss this and why wasn't a bigger deal made of it? It was a big functionality gap.

Repainting the bedroom

I need to find a "before" picture, but this is another triumph for Sarahmac the colormaster.

NYT graphic: Where the Heat and the Thunder Hit Their Shots

Even if you don't care for basketball, you should love the geographic shot analysis of the final two teams.  A few comments:

1. Some of the coloration appears broken, where a region on the chart has a "high" coloration but a low actual points per shot for the region (see, for example, the orange region on the right side of LeBron James' chart).  They appear to be regions with low numbers of shots, but that should be fixable with a decent spatial statistics algorithm.  
2. It might be better if more of the micro-regions were combined. 
3. You should look in particular at James Harden's chart (on the right, mid-page).  This is the reigning "6th man of the year", and you can tell how smart he is by his shot selection.  While he's athletic enough to get shots anywhere on the court, he eschews the midrange jumper because 3-pointers and shots near the rim are high-value shots.  In fact, the best part of the graphic, from an unintentional comedy standpoint, might be the "analysis" that states "However, he has virtually no midrange game; a vast majority of his shot attempts occur at the rim or beyond the arc, not many occur in between."  As if that's a problem with his game!  Midrange jumpers, even for a very good shooter like Durant, are not a high points-per-shot shot!

Trouble in Paradise (1932)

She says he's her secretary, [...] and he says he's her secretary.  Maybe I'm wrong, maybe he is her secretary. 

With a great script (the line above goes to an uncredited actress at a party), cast, and direction, it is an absolute crime that I hadn't heard of this movie until netflix suggested it; a victim of the Production code, it was pulled from the theaters for 33 years.  I highly recommend it, but could wish for a remake with modern staging.  Could we please get someone on this with Michael Fassbender (yes, I know he's in everything, but he'd be great here), Drew Barrymore, and Natalie Portman as the leads?

Got my road bike

Now I'm ready for the 2012 Colchester Tri, and I'm gonna break 40 minutes on the cycling section.


It's a used 62cm frame Motobecane Grand Touring**, which isn't a "serious" racing bike, but it's comfortable for me to ride and should be scads faster than my Trek Hybrid.  Picture at right in the ever-popular propped-up-against-a-building look


** fixed up by the Old Spokes Home

I Love You Philip Morris (2009)

Since I didn't really read the netflix description (which are generally terrible anyway), I was really confused because I thought this movie was something in the strain of Thank You for Smoking, so it took a little readjustment when it turned out to be Brokeback Me If You Can.  The problem is that DiCaprio's Frank Abagnale is a charming scoundrel in the Han Solo vein, while Carey's Steven Jay Russell is... not so much.  It would be one thing if one of the goals of I Love You Philip Morris was to underscore Russell's sociopathy, but aside from Carey's performance, the whole tone of the film is that of an offbeat romantic comedy... and it's the offbeat romantic comedy parts that really click.  Leslie Mann is great, Ewan McGregor is perfect, and it's Jim Carey playing his part like Tom Hanks' Forrest Gump (that's not a compliment) that keeps this from being a very good movie.

Innumeracy in the French Open brackets

The tennis majors drive me nuts when their brackets are unbalanced.  If all seeds advance, your #1 seed should play the #4 seed in the semifinals, NOT the #3 seed, and yet here we are, with #1 seed Djokovic playing #3 seed Federer in a rematch of their 2011 semifinal.  Worse, just last year Federer and Djokovic were the #2 and #3 seeds, respectively, so it's not like the French Open planners get this wrong every time.  If you want the rematch, then make Nadal the #1 seed; after all, he was last year's champion and the greatest clay court player of all time.  That could be unfair to Djokovic, because he has won the last 3 majors, but it's actually *more* unfair to Djokovic to force the Federer/Djokovic semifinals rematch because it gives Nadal an easier path to the finals.  Well... maybe it's not so much that it gives Nadal an easier path to the finals, because he owns Federer on clay, but that it makes Djokovic's path to the finals harder because Federer does well against Djokovic.

Radix; A.A. Attanasio; 1981

Another Nebula finalist.  I finally gave up halfway through and read the foreword (I've got the second edition), which explains:

Radix began with an insight from ... Lives of Ancient Philosophers: "Diogenes the Cynic lit a lamp in broad daylight and said as he went about, 'I am looking for a man,'" He says nothing about "the man" being honest.

...and about how Radix follows a man "to represent our polluted age" who is transformed.  Attanasio notes that:

Writing Radix confronted me with the literary challenge of fitting the motive of the novel, which is Diogenes' quest for a man, into a story that most readers would accept as a narrative and not a manual about self-transformation.

This is a noble goal, and the elements are here for a great novel, but I'm afraid that for me it reads like a manual about self-transformation.

The dangers of underground utilities...

... when idiots install them.  I've been slowly turning over the lawn in part of our yard in order to create an herb garden, digging a few inches deep with a spade.  Everything was fine until a couple of weeks ago, when I came inside to find that our cable was out.  Apparently I managed to cut the line, though I couldn't imagine how. Now I know:

The cable line was buried about an inch underground.  Ridiculous.  By contrast, see that red spot?  That's where the Burlington Electric Department marked where their utility lines are buried.  I'd already dug all over the spots where the electric utility lines are buried with no problems, because they buried their lines to a proper depth.  Whoever did the cable lines (Comcast took over from Adelphia, but I don't know whether Adelphia originally ran the lines to the house or if it was some previous company) did a shoddy job.  

We need to talk about storytelling

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) feels like a remake of Halloween told from the point of view of Michael Myers' mother.  There are some great shots in this movie, and Tilda Swinton and Ezra Miller are very good, BUT listening to the commentary, it sounds like they wanted it to be that Eva and Kevin's relationship is muddled and complex.  That would have made for a good story, but Kevin is portrayed as a psychopath from birth, and I just don't believe it as anything more than a B-grade horror movie.