North Korea

Just came upon this little tidbit. North Koreans are starving and China refuses to sell rice to western aid agencies for distribution.

SPIEGEL: How many people have been affected by the food shortages?

Göken: The World Food Program estimates between 5 and 6 million. At least 400,000 tons of grain is lacking.

Then there is this, "In addition, they are also lacking modern equipment — I didn’t see any tractors in the fields. Nor can one say that there is effective crisis management on the part of the government."

Yep, socialism doesn't work and the degree to which socialism is applied only hurries the final collapse. Hopefully, for the North Korean people, the collapse will come soon, since neither the East nor the West is any hurry to bring about 'regime change'.

Starbucks makes it easier for me

OK, I don't buy into the whole Starbucks "fair trade" thingy. In fact, I saw this article in March talking about the whole Fair Trade coffee scam. Short story, "Fair Trade" is just a marketing label, that allows wealthy coffee growers to appeal to your guilt. Why do I say wealthy? because farmers have to pay a fee to have their coffee "certified" and the fee is so enormous (even accounting for the fact that the organization makes NO effort to inspect the grower) that any extra profit they might have made has to go to licensing fees.

More here and here

BUT that is not the topic tonight. This is. I am an Android user, I have a Motorola Atrix and I am always looking for ways to simplify my life.

To manage my coffee habit, I use "My Coffee Card Pro" by Birbeck. It is a widget that allows me to see how much money is on the Starbucks Gold Card and will generate a barcode to allow me to buy coffee with my phone whenever I need to satisfy my Jones. Very convenient.
Now it looks like Starbucks is about to up the ante. According to the article, the official app will allow me to order my beverage via my phone... Just another way for them to seperate me from my money... wait, they already did that. Ok, this is just for convenience then.

Mr. President, You can’t buy good test scores.

Tuesday, April 13, 2011 President Obama said the following, “If there are bright
young Americans who have the drive and the will but not the money to go
to college, we can’t afford to send them. Go to China and you’ll see
businesses opening research labs and solar facilities. South Korean
children are outpacing our kids in math and science. Brazil is investing
billions in new infrastructure and can run half their cars not on
high-priced gasoline, but biofuels. And yet, we are presented with a
vision that says the United States of America – the greatest nation on
Earth – can’t afford any of this.”

He is really irritated here, the reason is the Ryan budget proposal.
President Obama, talks about it when he says, “A 70% cut to clean
energy. A 25% cut in education. A 30% cut in transportation. Cuts in
college Pell Grants that will grow to more than $1,000 per year.”

What President Obama doesn’t get is that if we want to buy higher test
scores it will cost $35,667 per kid, per year with no guarantee of
success. The reason is that spending on education isn’t a good predictor
for test scores, at least at the national level.

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide
evaluation of 15-year-old school pupils' scholastic performance,
performed first in 2000 and repeated every three years. It alternates
between main focus areas of Reading, Math and Science, so while Reading
has been tested each time, it has been the main focus twice so far, in
2000 and 2009.

When a politician tells you we are 15th in reading, 24th in math, or 21st in
science, the PISA test scores form the basis of that assertion.

On this graph, the US has the second highest GDP, but scores near the
average on the test. This is a linear regression model, but don’t let
the math scare you. It says is that if you want to predict what a
country’s score will be based on GDP, take the GDP, multiply it by .0004
and add it to the base score of 479. Here is the caveat, the R^2 number
of .059 means that you will likely be wrong. Actually what it shows is
that there is a very weak relationship between GDP and test scores.

The graph that sinks the Obama plan to increase spending on Education is here.
Here is the kicker: The test measures the cumulative spending on students form age 6 to age 15.
It doesn’t look at education spending per year. The US spends nearly
$105K (we’re #1 here) to educate our kids from the age of 6 to 15. That
is an average of $11,666 per school year.

The graph, however, shows a weak relationship between spending and test
scores. The linear model here is simple. To predict the score of any
country, take the spending per student, multiply it by .0002 and add it
to 476.8. If I wanted to use this model to improve the scores of
American kids to a top score of 541, the linear model tells me it would
cost $321,000 per kid - about three times what we are spending now.

Thankfully, the R^2 is very low (.09086) this means that there is a very weak
relationship between spending per pupil and test scores. That is why
Obama is wrong on this issue. The 25% cut in Federal outlays to
education actually makes sense.

If you would like to read the report, it is here. Most of the fluff in the paper makes no sense, but the graphs are very illuminating.