Jury Selection in Willard Robocall Trial Favors Russ Olson's Wentworth Neighbors

A group of randomly selected Lake County citizens will troop to the courthouse tomorrow to see if they win a seat on the jury for Daniel Willard's robocall trial, which will treat them to lengthy discourses on South Dakota campaign finance law, the First Amendment, and the conflicts therebetween.

Oh, wait, did I say randomly?

As I understand the process, the state and Willard both get to strike three jurors. That means the first 18 names on the jury list are probably all the further down we need to go to see who's likely to hear the case.

This case is happening in Lake County because resigning Senator Russell Olson is claiming the harm (remember, Olson, calls it terrorism) from Willard's robocalls. Olson lives in the Wentworth ZIP, 57075, as do 892 other Lake County residents. Wentworth/57075 makes up 7.97% of Lake County's 11,200-person population (I'm using 2010 Census data). Those percentages would shift a bit if we were talking just legal adults eligible for jury duty, but let's roll with what we have.

Given those numbers, one would expect a list of 18 people randomly drawn from Lake County to include maybe one or two of Russ's Wentworth neighbors. Do some math, and you discover that there's a 95% chance that an 18-person random sample of Lake County residents should include no more than three Wentworthers.

The first 18 names on the Willard trial jury list include nine people from Wentworth.

Run this experiment one million times, and you should get that many 57075 residents in your jury pool three times.

In an infinite universe, anything can happen. In Lake County, anything includes a jury pool with a highly unlikely geographical bias toward the influential aggrieved party.

Tangentially Related Judicial Trivia: Did you know that it is a Class 2 misdemeanor to ask the sheriff or deputy sheriff to place yourself or anyone else on a jury? See SDCL 16-13-44. Lawyer friends, can you explain to me where that statute came from? And has anyone ever been prosecuted under it?

SD, US Not Producing Enough Smart Kids

My well-read wife hands me this report from The Atlantic that includes data on how South Dakota students compare with their U.S. and international counterparts in posting high scores on standardized tests.

The good news: South Dakota has more kids scoring at advanced levels in math and science than the national average. We're 14th overall among the states for advanced math scores.

The bad news: we're getting beat by socialist states like Massachusetts and Minnesota, which are #1 and #2 with 11.4% and 10.8% (respectively) of their kids getting advanced math scores, compared to South Dakota's 6.5%. Our kids are also below average in really good reading, with only 1.9% of our kids getting advanced reading scores, compared to the national average of 3%.

The really bad news: The U.S. is getting creamed by other countries. Thirty countries have a higher percentage of kids getting advanced math scores than ours, including Ireland, Poland, Luxembourg, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, China, Korea, China, and top-dog Taiwan, where 28% of kids score "advanced" in math.

Oh, but this comparison isn't fair. Taiwan and Poland and all those other countries only test the best kids. They don't have all the ethnic diversity that we do to pull down their scores. Or at least those are the excuses we usually hear. But the folks behind these numbers, Stanford economist Eric Hanushek and his fellow researchers, have already controlled for those excuses and found the U.S. is still underperforming.

Hanushek has long rejected the idea that more money produces better education, and his latest data upholds that notion. According to The Atlantic, the U.S. spends more per student than everyone but Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Norway. Whatever we're spending our money on (culinary arts programs? new gyms?), we're not getting the academic outcomes we need to compete with the new workers from other countries.

Among the recommendations for better outcomes: more rigorous teacher training and testing. According to The Atlantic, Massachusetts's gains coincide with imposition of a basic teacher literacy test that weeded out over a third of new teachers in its first year. Massachusetts also requires students to pass an exam to graduate high school. (And please, spare me the hand-wringing over "test anxiety." Life is a test. If you can't handle marking a few bubbles with a Number 2 pencil, how will you handle freeway driving? or parenting?)

The U.S. is a world leader in many ways. Alas, our K-12 education system is not.

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Update 17:28 CST: Read more straight from the profs: Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann, "Teaching Math to the Talented," Education next, Winter 2011. That article includes everyone's favorite Web widget, an interactive map!

Thune's Paradox: 10% Cuts Never Eliminate Deficit; Debt Still Grows

When John Thune floated his "Deficit Reduction and Budget Reform Act of 2010," the Wonk Room noted that Thune's math was a bit off. His deficit reduction plan would create a joint committee, ten members from the House, ten from the Senate, equal numbers from each party (ah, spoken like a member of the minority) that would propose budget cuts to reduce the deficit by 10% every year.

Ever hear of Zeno's paradoxes? If you want to get to Hy-Vee, you first have to cover half the distance to the store. Then you have to cover half of the remaining half of the route. Then again, and again... nuts! You never get your grapes!

Ditto but worse with Thune's 10% plan. If enacted, his plan would chop the deficit down to 90% of the starting amount in year one, then 81%, then 72.9%.... We'd finally whittle the deficit down to less than 1% of the current amount by year 45 of the Thune plan... during which time the national debt would still have increased by an amount almost ten times the current annual deficit.

Google Sends Texas Kids to Madville Times... for Algebra Help

At 2:19 this afternoon, some poor soul on the Dallas County Schools network Googled this question:

stephanie's phone plan charges her a price that is directly proportional to the number of minutes she talks. one month she talked 2010 minutes and paid $67. if she talks 1400 minutes, how much will she have

Google's first response: my blog.

Sorry, kids. When Google doesn't know the answer, it apparently turns to me. I'm flattered. Assuming the question concludes, "How much will she have to pay?" the answer is...

1. ...less than $67, since she talked less, right?
2. ...found by using fractions!
3. ...sure to bubble up in the comment section, as I bet my readers will enjoy an algebraic diversion.

And if my readers can't get it, well, I'll provide an answer after supper in the comment section. Enjoy! Thanks, Google!

Music to Pat Powers' Ears: Jerstad Can't Do Math

KELO has some fun administering the math portion of Minnesota's GRAD test to some locals. I have some fun putting on my Pat Powers costume and fingering the mainstream media's clear liberal bias: while KELO announces the exact scores of Lincoln HS math and physics teacher Dan Conrad (perfect!), Lincoln HS junior Matt Olson (one wrong! wunderkind!), and KELO meteorologist Scot Mundt (11 wrong, but still passing—and probably done while extrapolating five different precip models), it withholds the scores of artist Terri Schuver and Democratic State Senator Sandy Jerstad. KELO notes only that Schuver and Jerstad didn't complete the test.

Come on, KELO: don't shield a public official from scrutiny! Post the numbers!

Political kidding aside, Minnesota is requiring all of its high school juniors to pass this test to graduate. That two adult professionals, including Jerstad, a retired college professor, cannot complete the math portion suggests that such tests are a silly way to measure how prepared high school students are for real-world work and problem solving.

Clinton Attendance Rally: Me and My Shadow?

I was wondering how many people attended the Hillary Clinton rally in Sioux Falls Thursday. KJAM provides no numbers, but says the crowd was "exceptionally lively." (Hmm... could some objective professional journalists tell me what that means? Is that exceptionally lively for a gathering at a hangar? Exceptionally lively for a campaign rally? Exceptionally lively for Midwestern German-Norwegian Lutherans?)

Here are some crowd estimates:

1. KELO: 900
2. that Sioux Falls paper*: 1000
3. Rapid City Journal: 1000
   
4. HillaryClinton.com: 2000

Next the Clinton campaign will be telling us that it takes 2,209 delegates, not 2,025, to win the Democratic nomination.

Clinton's math is a little better on her claim that the summer gas tax holiday could save truckers $2 billion. The Alaska Trucking Association (that's what Google gave me) says "the nation's 3.5 million truck drivers are on pace to spend a record $135 billion on diesel fuel this year, up $22 billion from 2007." $135 billion, divided by $4 a gallon, divided by 4 (summer is one fourth of the year), multiplied by 24.4 cents per gallon (that's the federal tax on diesel), equals $2 billion dollars and spare change.

This assumes, of course, that Big Oil would actually pass on the gas-tax holiday savings to consumers... and not pass on the cost of the windfall profits tax Clinton would use to cover the $9 billion the federal highway trust fund stands to lose.

*Yes, that Sioux Falls paper, which continues to run advertisements for a porn shop run by a man whom a judge believes stalked and harassed his female employees. Yuck.