Posts by Bart Janssen
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OnPoint: Re: Education, in reply to JacksonP,
A scatological scatter plot, if you will.
I hadn't realised there was a default for that in Excel.
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And all this would be fun and games at the expense of The Herald, but it really is all about the future of the children being taught in our schools.
Our media should be working to improve our education system, instead we get this.
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OnPoint: Re: Education, in reply to Russell Brown,
BTW, it seems to me that the HoS story isn’t actually based on class size as such – that information is not collected by the Ministry of Education – but on pupil-teacher ratios across schools. Which isn’t the same thing.
So not only is the y axis full of shit but so is the x axis?!?!?
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OnPoint: Re: Education, in reply to Nathaniel Wilson,
r gives you an indication of whether the two variables have a relationship
But in statistics a relationship is defined by the probability of the occurance of that relationship by pure chance. A relationship has no meaning unless there is a probability. While we are probably wrong to do so we do tend to use "r value" when we are referring to the probability that the relationship could have occured by chance. But we are mere molecular biologists in this lab :).
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It's also worth noting that the value on the X axis is probably real.
But the value on the y axis is probably a lot of shit.
Not really much point in plotting shit vs real.
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OnPoint: Re: Education, in reply to Hamish,
Are the values clustered to the bottom left the special schools?
They probably are but it's worth looking, outliers are often very informative.
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OnPoint: Re: Education, in reply to PeterLynch,
Why does the "Goodness of Fit" explanation talk about "R^2" but the table above it talks about the "r value" - or are these unrelated?
I'm pretty sure "r value" is slang for R^2. They are the same thing.
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OnPoint: Because Statistical Rigour, in reply to Kumara Republic,
After last week’s false start, John Hartevelt may actually have redeemed himself.
But the data is rubbish. You can't say anything from it. It's like prescribing chemotherapy on the basis of a consultation with a psychic.
Even if what you say is kind of what you'd expect (poor schools struggle) it's still wrong to say it because it implies the data have any value at all. It also ignore the fact that we've known for ages poor schools need help, we've known long before these stupid standards were put in place.
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Over the past 30 years the New Zealand education system has taken itself from a fairly standard empire derived system that performed pretty much on the average worlwide, to a world leading system.
It did so largely because decision making was taken out of the hands of politicians and put in the hands of knowledgable educators who make careful tested changes and carefully monitored the system to make sure their changes did no harm. We had a system of which we could be proud.
In less than two terms this government has made huge progress towards the destruction of that education system. With the pretty clear intent of shifting the education system into the hands of "for profit" enterprises and special interest groups.
It is disgusting that newspapers like The Herald seem only too willing to play along and make a profit with sensational yet meaningless demonising of some the best schools in the country. At a time when the media should be leading the charge to save our education system from this mindless political meddling it is instead profiting by scaremongering of the worst kind.
We had a world leading education system, we can still save it.
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Hard News: Fox News: I know, right?, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
The US is running a deficit because it is spending more than it earns. We could just as easily claim that the failure to raise taxes on poor people is causing it.
But the point you are casually ignoring, is that tax rates were reduced and the biggest benefactors of that reduction were the rich.
Raising taxes for the poor does not create anywhere nearly enough revenue.
And the problem with the US deficit has been a drop in revenue NOT an increase in expenditure.