Eideard

 
Thanks, Gasparrini

A respected international survey that found teenagers in Shanghai to be the best-educated in the world has prompted officials elsewhere across the globe to question their own educational systems, and even led the British education minister to promise an overhaul in student testing.

The results of the survey — the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA — issued early Tuesday, were also called “a wake-up call” by the U.S. education secretary.

PISA, conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, based in Paris, is a set of standardized tests that weighs reading comprehension, mathematics and science, and is taken by half a million 15-year-olds in 65 countries.

U.S. officials and Europeans involved in administering the test acknowledged that the Shanghai scores are by no means representative of all of China. But still, the results upended some preconceptions about schooling.

“Two countries with similar levels of prosperity can produce very different results,” Ángel Gurría, the O.E.C.D. secretary general, said in a statement on Tuesday. “This shows that an image of a world divided neatly into rich and well-educated countries and poor and badly educated countries is now out of date…”

Which means most Americans won’t accept the test as meaning much of anything, after all.

The survey showed Finland and South Korea far ahead of the United States in reading comprehension, mathematics and science, prompting stern words from the U.S. education secretary, Arne Duncan.

“We can quibble, or we can face the brutal truth that we’re being out-educated.” Mr. Duncan said.

Designed to compare standards between different education systems around the world, the PISA survey is held every three years. PISA scores are on a scale, with 500 as the average. Two-thirds of students in participating countries score between 400 and 600.

In math, the Shanghai students performed in a class by themselves, outperforming second-place Singapore, which has been seen as an educational superstar in recent years. On the math test last year, students in Shanghai scored 600, in Singapore 562, in Germany 513…

The report also included a finding that in every country surveyed, girls read better than boys — a gap that has widened since 2000. Also included was a finding that the best school systems are the most equitable — where students do well regardless of social background.

Here are the overall scores [.pdf]. Wander down the page and find your home country.

Thanks, Tom

An Ewa Beach man is claiming he is unable to bathe, dress himself or wake up in the day due to alleged “phenomena of psychological dependence and addiction” to a video game created by a South Korean developer.

Craig Smallwood, 51, filed a lawsuit against developer NCSoft Corp. last October with several charges including emotional distress and misrepresentation.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Alan Kay granted NCSoft’s motion to dismiss half of the eight charges, allowing the lawsuit to proceed…

Smallwood, who says he is a disabled veteran, also alleges that he has been “unable to function independently in usually daily activities such as getting up, getting dressed, bathing or communicating with family and friends.”

He claims to have been hospitalized for three weeks and that he now needs treatment and therapy three times a week because of the game…

Smallwood asserts that he continues to this day to have a “compulsive urge and need” to play the game, that he never received any warning from the company about the danger of addiction and that he would not have bought and played the game if he would become addicted to it.

Someone, somehow, give me a break from neurotic lamebrains filing lawsuits over their own screwup decisions.

“Zoe” opening up to the Press
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

French carmaker Renault is facing a [miniscule] backlash over plans to christen a new model Zoe.

Parisian Zoe Renault, 23, has hired lawyers to insist that Renault scrap its branding.

“I could not bear to hear: ‘Zoe’s broken down’ or ‘We need to get Zoe overhauled‘,” she told Le Parisien newspaper.

Renault is facing other petitions from women called Zoe. A Renault spokesman said Zoe was not a “definitive choice”.

The all-electric Renault Zoe ZE (zero emission) is set for launch in 2012. Zoe – which means “life” in Greek – was apparently chosen to underline the car’s environmental credentials.

Zoe Renault – who has no apparent family link to the company – said in an interview with Le Parisien that she could not bear to be associated with a car for the rest of her life, and all the inevitable sarcastic gibes.

Her lawyer David Koubbi, who specialises in the protection of first names and is representing other Zoes, said he had sent a letter to Renault’s chief executive arguing that the plans were an attack on the rights of his clients.

If the company does not change its plans, Mr Koubbi said he would take the case to court.

Cripes. A lawyer whose specialty is the protection of first names?

Sound like the practice of law in France attracts as many unproductive parasites as does the U.S. bar.

Psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis have found an intriguing possibility that personality and brain aging during the golden years may be linked.

Studying MRI images of 79 volunteers between the ages of 44 and 88 — who also had provided personality and demographic data — the researchers found lower volumes of gray matter in the frontal and medial temporal brain regions of volunteers who ranked high in neuroticism traits, compared with higher volumes of gray matter in those who ranked high in conscientious traits…

She notes also that the results could be seen as “the tail wagging the dog.” That is, it is actually brain changes during aging that influence personality.

“Right now, we can’t disentangle those two, but we plan to in the future by conducting ongoing studies of the volunteers over time to note future structural changes,” Head says…

“We assumed that neuroticism would be negatively related to structural volume,” Jackson says. “We really focused on the prefrontal and medial temporal regions because they are the regions where you see the greatest age changes, and they are also seats of attention, emotion and memory. We found that more neurotic individuals had smaller volumes in certain prefrontal and medial temporal parts of the brain than those who were less neurotic, and the opposite pattern was found with conscientiousness…”

Another way of looking at the findings, Head says, is that neuroticism might add an increasing vulnerability to the pathological processes that go on in aging, particularly in Alzheimer’s.

So, if I plucked some bible-quoting, creationist birther from the middle of a Tea Party rendezvous – grabbed him by the neck and gave him a shake – I’d probably hear his brain rattling around inside his kettle, eh?