{"id":10513,"date":"2007-05-10T21:17:36","date_gmt":"2007-05-11T01:17:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/05\/10\/10513.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:56:27","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:56:27","slug":"first-in-income-first-in-nutme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/05\/10\/first-in-income-first-in-nutme\/","title":{"rendered":"First in income, first in nutmegs, last one in the pool is a rotten egg"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I happened across a fellow blogging as Gideon over at Public Defender, who has a note<\/a> about a recent report that says, among other things, that Connecticut has the longest average time to select juries for both serious criminal tries and civil trials. Gideon says that’s a Good Thing.\n

On the whole, I agree (although he does not recognize that there is a cost as well as a benefit to a luxurious selection process), but I agree that it’s a Good Thing that we take as much time as we need, rather than it being a Good Thing that we’re first. If we took the right amount of time, and Massachusetts or New York took longer, well, good for us. Being first is meaningless. Or, rather, ranking first is only meaningful in context; it’s possible, for instance, that the reason we are first is due to inefficiencies rather than beneficial policies, and that we could learn from the states ranked second and third. Or that the third-ranked state could learn from us. In a national survey, though, keep in mind that some<\/I> state was going to be ranked first.\n

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking at the ED in ’08<\/a> site, which features rather prominently some state-by-state statistics about average performance on standardized tests, including rank. Now, I don’t trust averages, and I don’t trust standardized tests, so I wasn’t super inclined to pay much attention anyway, but I noticed that (f’r’ex) CT is ranked fourth in 4th grade reading and ninth in 4th grade math. In eighth grade, we rank seventeenth in reading and ninth in math. Which means ... er ... what, again? Is our early reading education good and our education for 9-13 years not as good? Or are there thirteen states that suck at early reading education but have terrific remedial programs for middle school? Or something else entirely?\n

There are useful things that ranks can start you toward. If a group of states were ranked near each other in 1997, and one was no longer near the others by 2002, you could look into why. It might be policies implemented in those years. Or demographics. Or the economy. But it would be worth looking into. Similarly, if a region seems to all be ranked near each other, it would be worth looking into other correlations. Is it local policy? Federal policy? Is it movement between states? Is it the weather? But there could well be something looking into.\n

What isn’t helpful is to be shocked—shocked—that somebody is last. Of course somebody is going to be last. The question is whether they suck<\/I>, and if they suck<\/I>, then that’s a problem, whether they are last or twenty-fifth.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I happened across a fellow blogging as Gideon over at Public Defender, who has a note about a recent report that says, among other things, that Connecticut has the longest average time to select juries for both serious criminal tries…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10513"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18024,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10513\/revisions\/18024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}