The PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) test is administered to 15 year olds in industrialized countries every three years. The 2006 results were just released and show that US students are ranked 17th out of 30 in science and 24th in math. About 1.3% of students reached the highest level on the test overall [...]
Archive for 5 December 2007
So just how stupid are US teens?
Posted: 5 December 2007 by Jason Adams in UncategorizedTags: germany, intelligence, joachim wuttke, math, pisa, placement tests, schools, science, statistics, usa
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Snowier and snowier
Posted: 5 December 2007 by Jason Adams in UncategorizedTags: cmu, construction, dogs, gates center, mexicans, snow, winter
The snow continues here. Today it was covering the road. When I took Daedalus and Willow out in the morning, they both weren’t having any of it. Daedal balked at the door and Willow was stepping gingerly and obvious wondering what had gone wrong with the world. They finally got used to it, though the [...]
Java Properties
Posted: 5 December 2007 by Jason Adams in UncategorizedTags: code, java, java tips, programming, properties, settings, software projects
I discovered the java.util.Properties class a couple weeks ago in the ginormous Java API docs. If you’ve ever created a software project where you have a lot of different settings that change frequently, this is the class for you. In my research, I implement all these different algorithms for various things, find out they don’t [...]
Python ecstacy
Posted: 5 December 2007 by Jason Adams in UncategorizedTags: humor, programming, programming languages, python, python love, xkcd
From the most excellent xkcd: I felt the exact same way when I first picked up python. It was like finding the holy grail of programming languages. To be able to just throw things into a list and access them without having to worry about casting. To throw around functions like they were variables. To [...]
