We are number one! (Updated)

Washington students top nation in SAT scores – Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle)::
[Via ]

Washington high-school students bested the nation in SAT scores for the seventh straight year, state school officials said Tuesday.

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Seven years in a row! Yet our state spending is 42th. Now if we could only run our healthcare system as well.

[UPDATE}: Okay, I actually spent some time looking at the numbers and this was a misleading little quote. We bested the national average, not the nation. My error.

As I expected, when the actual numbers are looked at, there really is little difference between states, since the standard deviation is well over 100. So, WA has an average math score of 531 ± 104 while TX has a score of 506 ± 108. And the national average is 515 ± 116. I would be very hard-pressed to say any of those numbers are significantly different.

I have not looked though every state but I would expect that there really is no significant difference in state test scores. The averages might differ somewhat but the errors are so large that it really becomes meaningless to compare them.

As the College Board itself says:

Media and others often rank states, districts and schools on the basis of SAT scores despite repeated warnings that such rankings are invalid.

Sage words for us all.

Technorati Tags: Education

A harbringer of the end?

This Week’s Sci-Fi Worthy Parasite: Leishmania spp.:
[Via Observations of a Nerd]

Ah, the joys of a tropical getaway. There’s warm, clear waters, soft, sandy beaches, and of course, a whole ton of amazing parasites waiting to gorge on your delicious flesh.

Anyone who has traveled out of the US has been told horror stories of the disgusting creatures that await them. Take a nice trip to Brazil for some sightseeing, for example, and you might find yourself at the mercy of a small, intracellular protozoan parasite of the genus Leishmania.

There are many species of Leishmania living all over the world, from Saudi Arabia to Texas. No one’s entirely sure how the parasites ended up in such diverse locations, or where they originated, but wherever there are sand flies, there is Leishmania. Like many parasites, it has a fairly complicated life, full of developmental stages and alternate hosts. Here’s a good explanatory figure:

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Leishmania is a very interesting organism. It has a complex life cycle and it causes one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases. But the really cool fact, as delineated in this post, is that it has been doing this for a long, long time:

As for science fiction-worthiness, how’s this: some suggest that Leishmania might have did in the dinosaurs. Researchers have successfully found ancient parasites in amber-preserved insects. There are even books on dino parasites.

How could these little creatures have wreaked so much havoc? Well, some argue, they were new and invasive back then, and the reptiles didn’t have the opportunity to evolve immune defenses. Massive outbreaks causing devastating population decreases and even localized extinctions could have seriously hindered dinosaur species. So it’s possible that parasitic overrun might just have contributed to the fall of the great reptiles. Of course, other factors were also in play, but perhaps the parasites gave the final blow which kept dinosaurs from adapting to changing environments.

So, maybe Leishmania is responsible for major extinction events. At least indirectly.

Well, unless they find dinosaur skins with lesions on them, this is all just conjecture. The fact that the parasite can be found in the guts of ancient insects does not mean that they were able to find safe harbor in dinosaurs. Mammals make good hosts but dinosaurs?

I’m a little skeptical.

Technorati Tags: Science