A point of concern

One of the things in this screen shot makes me very worried... Just how good IS Google at knowing what I need?

(click to open it at full size)

Upon the trials of self-denial at the holiday season

Must I, in feting Our Lord's birth
Add several inches to my girth?

Goodness but I am deep.

Deep = profound, and is not to be confused with wide, which I am certainly attempting not to be.

A Winter Poem

The joy of wearing layered clothes
Does not make up for runny nose.

Imperfection

I was happily tooling about Wegman's the other day when I saw a particularly well heeled man give me an odd look. I didn't think much of it - I knew I'd applied my makeup properly and my clothes matched - I was even wearing a pretty sweater. It wasn't until I was checking out that I happened to glance down and notice a large smear of now-dried sweet potato mush across my shoulder. It did rather ruin the outfit.

This came back to me yesterday after taking the GRE. (Read on, I promise this will all come together)

I confess, I didn't spend as much time studying as I should have. However what time I DID spend I spent exclusively on the Math section, knowing that this section was going to qualify me for the economics programs I would like to attend much more than the vocab section.

The results are now in. I scored 800 on the verbal. I can say this without appearing too prideful because my math score was abysmal. No wait - I'm serious. Abysmal. I knew I should have canceled it, but I also knew Dave wouldn't have believed me when I told him how bad it was. Now at least I have the pleasure of saying "I told you so". (And a hollow pleasure it is, too).

The real kicker is that I'm good at math! I really am! My grades bear me out in this.

So anyway, Dave being the wonderfully supportive guy he is, somehow turned this into a compliment on my verbal abilities. This made me think a bit about how my interests have changed. Reading used to be so vital to me that I would read the back of shampoo bottles when I was in the bathroom, or head straight for the greeting-card aisle when we went to the store. Should I really be trying so hard to "fit in" with a math-y major when I have more natural affinity for language?

I am not sure that I like all the changes I see in myself. I am not sure that I like my imperfections. But when I ponder on poor math scores and baby-stained outfits, I am still left considering that all in all, my life is pretty good. No wait, great. Here I sit, with a terrible cold but a husband who loves me and brings me tissues, OJ, and soup. My clothes are stained with baby food and spit-up, but I have a beautiful and healthy baby boy who giggles, who loves me and smiles when he sees me. I may not get the score I want in math, but I am in the happy situation of not having my livelihood depend on it!

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote one of the most beautiful poems about imperfection that I have ever found. I've copied it here in the hopes that you too will love a paean to Pied Beauty:

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;	5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:	10
Praise him.

The GRE is a Broken Test

Margaret is taking the GRE this Thursday so I’ve been thinking about the problems with the quantitative portion of the exam.

In my mind the point of a standardized test is to distinguish between the people taking it. The test should generate enough variation that you have a wide range of results. These results should correlate to what you’re trying to measure (in the GRE’s case, aptitude for graduate studies). 

A few people should do really well, a few people should do really poorly, and most should be somewhere in the middle. This is called a bell curve.

The verbal portion of the GRE looks a lot like the ideal bell curve.

The quantitative portion doesn’t.

It’s even worse for economics majors.

The problem here is that there’s no way to tell someone who’s pretty good at math from someone who’s very good at math. They all score in the upper 700’s. And the mode is 800! Perfect shouldn’t be the most common score on any test.

Now in the GRE’s defense, the quantitative portion does look like a bell curve for some disciplines.

But most of the people taking the exam aren’t going into these disciplines (or the total curve would look more like these).

There are subject specific tests but I’ve heard that few schools use them. In econ, I didn’t see one school that required it. (After all if one school started requiring it it would receive fewer applicants relative those who don’t.)

I think the solution is to design the test so that the aggregate probability distribution is a bell curve and just reconcile to the fact that some disciplines will be weighted to the left or the right of the mean. Which seems to be the way the verbal portion is.

Here are some other probability density functions for probable fun.

Higher Education in the US

Once your done guessing I'll show you some interesting charts. What? You want charts without being required to contribute? Come on buddy, not even the census does that!

The Census estimates 29%. Yep less than a third. I was really surprised to see this. I walked through the whole country club trying to find someone without a degree and many a finger bowl of caviar was spilt by the shear audacity of the question!

Well it wasn’t that bad but I was struck at just how segregated my life is. I can count the number of friends I have who didn’t go to college on one well manicured hand.

Here are some tantalizing more bits of data: This number is very different by race, not very different by age or sex . (Except for women over the age of 65. As you might have heard, a lot more women started going to college in the 1960’s, but the percent of men attending seems to have dropped to have dropped a bit to keep us right around 30%.)

A real puzzle for me is that the percent doesn’t seem to be increasing if you look at age groups currently alive but it does seem to increase if you look at historical census estimates of total number of people with degrees. Weird huh? Could it be that there are more continuing students who eventually get a degree than I’m aware of? Could it be that people without college degrees die younger? Any other ideas?

*TeamHedengren recently received the following praise: " I don't know of any blogs with more line graphs than the Hedengrens'!"-Lia

Another Olin Video!

The good news: This is adorable. The bad news: it takes us 40 minutes to make the bed.