This news got tons of coverage from the news media. And rightly so. But in their haste to cover the story, almost all the outlets omitted something rather important, which the ScienceNow did pick up on:

Neither boys nor girls get many tough math questions on state tests now required to measure a school district’s progress under the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law. Using a four-level rating scale, with level one being easiest, the authors said that they found no challenging level-three or -four questions on most state tests. The authors worry that means that teachers may start dropping harder math from their curriculums, because “more teachers are gearing their instruction to the test.”

There are two very important points here:

1. Today’s tests are mostly easy questions.
2. Students aren’t being taught to answer average or above average difficult questions.

Keeping this in mind, let’s revisit the conclusion that boys and girls are getting the same test results. It’s possible there’s a big, important point missing from the study.

Let’s invent a scale of 1 to 10 with which to measure mathematical ability. And for sake of argument, let’s say that the scores used to be as follows, with the boys scoring better than the girls:

• Boys - 8 out of 10
• Girls - 6 out of 10

Now, what if these are the new scores?

• Boys - 3 out of 10
• Girls - 3 out of 10

In this case, boys and girls are equal. Unfortunately, they are equally stupid. :-(

Now re-read the two important points above about students not being tested with hard questions and not be even being taught hard math. Whoa.

So, could this be what happened? Did boys and girls just score worse?

The problem here is that the reporting is relative, not absolute. We were asking, “how good are girls at math compared to boys?”; instead we should be ask “how good are girls at math?”. It’s not like K-12 math has changed that much in the past 100 years. You’d think we could figure out a way to do this objectively.

This reminds me of how SAT scores were re-balanced. The SAT is designed to have a mean score of 500 with a standard deviation of 100. Over time the median started to drop and the SAT was re-centered in 1995.

My older sister took the SAT before the rebalancing and I took it afterward. As a result, my scores are “higher” than hers; though if you convert them to the same base, we scored roughly the same. Yeah for grade inflation! :-)

Speaking of grade inflation, did you know that for a while at Princeton 46% of the grades given were A’s? Now the policy has changed so that “35% of grades in classroom work, and 55% of grades in independent work” are A’s. Yes, this seems more reasonable. :-P

We checked out of the apartment. I’d lived there for just about 6 years. My rough estimate is that I gave Avalon Redmond Place around $68,000 in rent over that time (plus all the money Chris and Andrew gave them while we were roomies). In return they kindly gave me back my entire deposit of $250 (oh, and a place to live).

$68,000 in rent. Wow. It’s scary when you think about it. The obvious observation is, “shouldn’t you have brought a condo/house instead?” With 20/20 hindsight, sure, that would have been the right thing to do, but only because of a Fed-induced housing bubble.

When I first moved to Seattle, I didn’t have plans to stay that long. Specifically, I had to see if I liked my job and the area before committing. Common sense indicates that you should expect to own an house for 5 years before you recoup closing costs and turn the corner on paying mostly interest.

Of course, the housing bubble artificially caused a lot of temporary house value increases; if I’d bought something when I moved there and then sold it when I left, I could have made some decent money. On the other hand, the bubble could have popped earlier and I could have lost all my appreciation. And you also have to keep in mind that rent/buy ratios are way out of whack in the Puget Sound.

But, of course, the move back to the Boulder area was always in the cards and I did end up changing jobs much sooner than I would have guessed when I moved to Seattle, so who knows. :-)

Update (7/30/08): I just realized I calculated the rent total wrong. It should be ~68K over 6 years (corrected above).

• Movers came and turned out apartment into boxes. Lots of boxes. I think we had on the order of 140 boxes.
• Movers came and took the boxes and the furniture.
• Car guy came and took our cars.
• We checked out of the apartment. I’d lived there for just about 6 years. My rough estimate is that I gave Avalon Redmond Place around $68,000 in rent over that time (plus whatever Chris and Andrew gave them while we were roomies). In return they kindly gave me back my entire deposit of $250 (oh, and a place to live).
• We flew one-way to Denver on Wednesday.
• Rented a car and stayed with Mom and Dad.
• Looked for houses to rent.
• Had our cars delivered.
• Found a place to rent in Lafayette.
• Rented it.
• Had boxes and furniture delivered (all within 5 days of arriving).
• Unpacked lots of boxes.
• Bought lots of things for the house. (We bought a lot of stuff, Visa loves us right now. Our checking account does not.)
• Had Mom, Dad, and Sri over lots of times.
• Crissy’s family came and visited for a week.
• Went to my high school reunion.

Of course, each of these things has an interesting and fun story behind it. Maybe I’ll write about some of them in later posts. :-)

Update (7/30/08): I just realized I calculated the rent total wrong. It should be ~68K over 6 years (corrected above).

So, anyway, over time, our beer stash grows.

Last night, I was cleaning out our second bedroom (the office / guest room / storage room) I realized that we had over 50 bottles of beer. This morning I carried them all out to my car and brought them to work with the goal of giving them away.

As luck would have it, one of my colleagues is having a party in 2 weeks, so she is inheriting all the beer. Yay! 50 fewer things to take to Colorado!

This week started with a little party when it suddenly hit me that while all this time I’ve been thinking, “we’re moving in late June”, it was suddenly late June. And that put me in a really sad mood.

And to make matters worse, this whole week has been a series of goodbye lunches and coffees. Also every time we go out, there’s the “this is the last time I’ll eat here”. It’s pretty weird.

This weekend, we’re going to try to go to the Fremont Solstice Parade, this was the first Seattle event I attended (thanks Sapan!) 6 years ago when I moved here, so it seems logical to attend go again as we leave. :-)

All these goodbyes remind me of college, where guys fell into 3 categories of goodbye-ers:

1. Scared to be emotional - these guys would say ‘um’ a lot and finally just shake hands or hug at the end
2. Avoiders - these guys would either just avoid everyone or say goodbye as if it weren’t a moving away event. Just a “see ya” and turn and leave.
3. Stoic manly man - firm handshake, good eye contact and a heartfelt “good luck”.

So far, I’m category #3. I imagine I’ll be #1 by the end.

I’ve been thinking it through in my mind over and over, and even though it’s hard, moving to Boulder is the right thing for us, our families, and eventually the family we’ll start — Colorado will hopefully have lots of little Vijay’s and little Crissy’s one day. :-)

My guess is that some “expert” sarcastically said, “Next thing you know, they will charge passengers by weight.” And then the talking heads took the story and ran with it. And kept running.

There’s a huge overhead and headache of weighing all the customers and then charging them. Check-in times would be longer and more staff would be need. Plus, there would be all sorts of privacy concerns and lawyers would have a field day with discrimination lawsuits.

It’s much, much easier to “socialize” it and just spread out the cost across all the passengers. Which is what airlines do today anyway.

If you’re not convinced, think of this: who are the airlines’ most profitable customers? They are the guys in first and business class. And let’s be honest, most of those business guys are pretty big. How do you think they would feel about being weighed at the airport in front of everyone?

Charge for luggage? Sure, the business traveler is annoyed, but not that much; after all, he just expenses it. But you start weighing him, and you just lost a really valuable customer. Unless all the airlines start this at the same time, you’ll see a significant amount of people that go to the airline that doesn’t completely treat them like cattle.

The big airlines have consistently been backing themselves into a corner, by signing untenable contracts with unions, having an unnecessary diversity of equipment, and using the hub/spoke model in order to get subsidies and, in many cases, be granted a near monopoly from hub cities.

Add in rising fuel costs and the airlines can’t adjust. So they need to raise fares. This completely makes sense, if the price of one of your “raw materials” go up, sure, end-consumer prices will go up to compensate. There’s no mystery there.

What I don’t understand is adopting an a la carte pricing model while prices are going up. (A la carte pricing is when the customer purchases only individual items instead of a fixed group of offerings.) I’m not debating the merits of a la carte pricing, just the timing.

Of course, It’s very likely that if the luggage wasn’t charged extra, the basic fare would go up more to compensate. But that’s not the point. The consumer see prices going up and quality of product going down; so we have to pay more to get less.

Now if just prices went up and quality was the same, the consumer would “pay more for the same” and the consumer anger could be easily deflected to the rising oil prices.

And I don’t understand the reasoning behind charging for soda. The justification is the weight. Well, if I’m not going to get a drink on the plane, I’m going to bring my own with me. So the weight is the same. The only difference is instead of the airline paying wholesale for the soda, I pay retail in the airport. And the airline wasn’t giving me that soda for free, you can count on that being a piece of the total airline fare.

Maybe, the airline can now staff the place with fewer stewardesses? Unlikely, those are union employees. So where’s the savings? The airline at most dropped the wholesale cost of soda on the fare. Wow, 15 cents cheaper fare. Probably not worth the PR hit in the first place.

Consider one of the orthogonal cases: suppose that airline fares were steady (or dropping). An airline could introduce a la carte pricing on rarely used things like the 2nd bag of checked luggage. Then they could drop the price and get some more business.

Alternatively, the airline could do a refund based system. When you check in and don’t have any checked luggage, the customer gets a $25 voucher for his next flight.

Both of these approaches would give you a la carte pricing with good to neutral PR.

So why did just about everyone do a la carte pricing? Because one airline did it first and was able to raise its base fares a little less than everyone. So everyone scrambled so their base fares would be inline. Stupid first mover.

Of course, every first year business student’s favorite airline, Southwest, is still doing fine and expects to make a modest profit despite the economic climate. And guess what, they don’t charge for checked luggage. Way to be a rebel Southwest! :-)

No army can stop an idea who’s time has come.

I can’t explain it, but not only does that sound right, it makes me feel good. :-)

After all, “history is written by the victor”. Whoever is in power generally controls the media and information flow. It doesn’t really matter that someone writes something, if it never gets distributed.

Maybe it’s more appropriate to amend the saying to be: “The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the guy with the sword decides who gets the pen.”

Shortly after it came out, I read Tim Ferriss’ widely popular book, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. And then I felt slightly ill. Suffice to say, I didn’t care for the book at all. I’m really happy I got the book from the library, instead of paying money on it.

The first part of the book is reminder that life is short, so don’t worry so much and have some fun. Not a very original thought, but I suppose lots of people always forget this. He also tells us to read Thoreau, doing which would essentially makes this whole section of the book incredibly redundant.

And yes, “live your life now, don’t wait until later” is great advice, but just about every philosopher and good parent has been saying this for years upon years.

The rest of the book is basically a get rich quick type plan sprinkled into self-promotion and tips on how to eliminate wasteful time-consuming activities from your life. Basically he says, working a job is stupid, you should just sell something online and outsource every piece of the business so you can do whatever you want.

It’s good strategy, but let’s be honest; it’s not at all original. “Absentee ownership” is a tried and true income making method. The trick is that you need some income producing property or product. And that’s the tough part. Anyone can profit from an income generating asset. But how do you get one? Ferriss doesn’t really talk about how to do this.

Ferriss’ product (aside from the book) is some unregulated dietary supplement that body builder types use. So far, he’s a one hit wonder. Lots of of people hit it big once. I want to hear from the guys that do it more than once; those guys have real experience, skills and knowledge; they weren’t just lucky once.

A lot of the book is about how to use outsourced personal assistants to do your busywork for you. Generally this is a reasonable idea, but Ferriss takes it way too far. He basically says, “Why send your mom a birthday card like a sucker? I just have my assistants sign a card and send it with flowers.”

Sadly, I’m only barely exaggerating.

The other concept of the book I wanted to discuss is the idea of a “low-information” diet. Ferriss talks about having “selective ignorance” so that you ignore and don’t seek out information. For voting for president, for example, he ignores everything and then a week before asks some of his friends who to support, reads some news for an hour and then decides.

I’m really disappointed in this. This is basically voting for whoever is more popular. Instead of using your god-given ability to learn, reason, and be an intellectually curious individual, you’ll just go with whatever most people think.

What about learning, self-exploration, development of a value system and then acting on it? Nah… it’s easier to hang out at the beach. That’s just sad. If there’s ever a time to listen to Mark Twain, it’s in today’s world:

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

Lastly, Ferriss’ own auto-biographical elements make him seem like, well, a jerk. He brags about winning a big kick-boxing championship with basically 4 weeks of training. He explains that he lost nearly 30 pounds for the weigh-in and gained it back before the tournament. This way he was able to compete three levels below his weight bracket and got to beat up on those “poor little guys”.

Also, he exploited a loophole in the rules that said, if his opponent “falls off the elevated platform three times in a single round”, he loses. So Ferriss just basically shoved guys 3 weight divisions below him out of the ring and won the championship.

I’m not sure I’d brag about that.

So if you want to get rich quick, Tim’s got a great book for you. All you need are some affiliate marketers, a drop shipper, and a website. It’s so easy! And if you call now, he’ll even throw in an AbTronic!

In summary, don’t read this book. I think I lost 10 IQ points in the course of reading it. :-P