Austin Contrarian

Second anniversary

Today is the second anniversary of my first post.  

For the curious, my most-viewed and most-linked entries were the weighted density stuff, thanks to links from Matthew Yglesias, the New Republic blog, Ryan Avent, Environmental Graffiti, the Overhead Wire, and a number of others.

Second and third were one of the Northcross posts and, believe it or not, my piece that started the Hyde Park pedestrian/bicyclist flap.  (I never know what will strike a nerve.)

Now I have an anniversary bleg:  What's the most irritating thing about this blog?  Formatting, length of posts (too long or too short), drab layout. Too much salmonella?  Or, nothing, really, it's just that I'm a jackass?   (I can count on Dahmus not to leave me hanging.)

Olympics blackout

To protest the Russian invasion of Georgia, American ethanol subsidies, and the city of Austin's refusal to adopt a rational water policy, I plan to boycott the Olympics this year.  If I watch one minute of coverage, it will only be because I stumble while walking through the den when my wife has it on, and I twist my ankle pretty badly, so badly that I can't get up for a couple of minutes, during which time I have to watch television to take my mind off the pain, and there aren't commercials on at the time.  

Judging from my site traffic, though, many of you plan to spend the next two weeks watching NBC's wussified coverage.  That's OK; I don't think any less of you for supporting armed agression against an American ally or our environment-wrecking, hunger-inducing corn boondoggle.  Enjoy.

Seriously, I can't compete with the Olympics, so blogging will be light for the next couple of weeks.

Watch Wal-Mart spread across the U.S.

A very cool video.

Homosexual fatigued after cut-and-dry performance.

I love the internets.

Some religious group calling itself the American Family Association reposts AP news stories on a site it calls OneNewsNow, but with one slight modification:  The AFA apparently uses an auto-replace featue to replace "inappropriate" words with the AFA-sanctioned synonyms.  "Gay" is one of these inappropriate words.  Or at least that is the conclusion most people are drawing from this article, which recounts Tyler Tyson Gay's record-breaking 100 m performances at the U.S. Olympic trials over the weekend:

Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday.

His wind-aided 9.85 seconds was a fairly cut-and-dry performance compared to what happened a day earlier. On Saturday, Homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heat and had to scramble to finish fourth, then in his quarterfinal a couple of hours later, ran 9.77 to break the American record that had stood since 1999.

One of the men who talked about challenging Homosexual in the 100, his former Arkansas teammate Wallace Spearmon, failed to make it to the final by the slimmest of margins. The top four runners advance from each semifinal, and Spearmon finished fifth in his-all of .001 behind Michael Rodgers.

. . .

Homosexual didn't get off to a particularly strong start in the first semifinal, but by the halfway mark he had established a comfortable lead. He slowed somewhat over the final 10 meters-nothing like the way-too-soon complete shutdown that almost cost him Saturday.

Asked how he felt, Homosexual said: "A little fatigued."

H/t Houston's Clear Thinkers.  ScienceBlogs has more, including some quotes that didn't make it into the Google Cache.  (AFA has fixed the original article.)  The people at Right Wing Watch catalogue other gaffes by these knuckleheads.

The most obnoxious promo ever.

Surely someone else has trashed TBS over this  . . .

Last night I was watching a Family Guy episode on the DVR.  Out of nowhere, Bill Enqvall popped up on the screen, paused the dialogue in the middle of a line, and plugged his own show.

Wow. 

If I were a TBS advertiser, I'd tell TBS's ad execs, "So you don't think anyone watches the commercials either?"  

Splitting the baby.

Another Solomonic opinion (pdf).

I've been promoted to "economist."

Thanks.

Graduation rates

According to a new study of graduation rates in large cities, only 58.2% of Austin's high school students earn a diploma.

AISD reassures us the real number is over 77% -- the study "doesn't adjust for things like students moving into private schools, students moving out of state and students entering home-schooling. The data our state prepares are much more precise because they are actually tracking a student over time."

I dunno.  Just eyeballing AISD's own enrollment data (pdf), the study seems plausible:

 

12th grade classes have only 80% or so of the enrollment of the 10th grade classes two years before.  And that's enrolled 12th graders.  I imagine well under 90% of enrolled seniors graduate each year.   

The pertinent question anyway is how many 9th graders graduate.  9th grade attrition is probably much higher than 10th grade because weaker students are retained in the 9th grade (note the persistent bulge in 9th grade enrollment). 

I'd be surprised if much more than half of the students who start the 9th grade end up graduating from AISD.

This is a small sample, of course; perhaps these figures are just anomalies.  And, yes, this is a crude, seat-of-the-pants analysis.  But if 77% of all high school students graduate, you'd expect that to be reflected in relative class sizes.

As for AISD's explanation for the drop in class sizes:  Sure, some of these students move away.  But some students also move into town.  I suspect that families who move to the suburbs for the schools tend to do so before their kids hit the 10th or 11th grade.  I also have trouble believing that there is a large exodus from public to private school in the middle high school years (although I'm sure it happens). 

This study blames low graduation rates -- and the alleged under-reporting of graduation rates -- on high-stakes testing.  I realize that graduation rates are ideologically fraught statistics.  But the theory makes sense to me:  High-stakes testing (and No Child Left Behind) incentivizes principals and administrators to demonstrate yearly academic improvement.  Since they (and probably teachers, too) have little real control over student improvement, their natural incentive is to run off the bad students and jigger the graduation rates to disguise what's really going on.

(Of course, this incentive exists for all schools, not just AISD, and I know that the state has elaborate rules for reporting drop outs -- I'm not accusing anyone of fraud, perhaps just creative accounting.)

Perhaps AISD should consider incentivizing those who can actually make a difference.  I don't have a problem with paying students to study -- we subsidize college education; why not high school?  There are large, positive spillover effects from education, which means people typically underinvest in their own education.  This is a classic market failure that can be fixed (perhaps) by the government setting the proper incentives.

The kind of letter lawyers would rather not receive from a federal judge . . .

   

(Not my case, thankfully.)

Small footprint indeed . . .

A fellow in Gonzalez is making 200-square foot houses.  He's using salvaged lumber and touting them as "vintage."

(H/t Newmark's Door)

PS:  The story is from a Seattle paper.