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Students From States With Faster Internet Tend To Have Higher Test Scores
An anonymous reader sends word of correlation found between higher internet speeds and higher test scores. Quoting:
The numbers—first crunched by the Internet provider comparison site HSI — show a distinct trend between faster Internet and higher ACT test scores. On the high end, Massachusetts scores big with an average Internet speed of 13.1Mbps, and an average ACT test score of 24.1. Mississippi, on the other hand, has an average speed of just 7.6Mbps and an average score of 18.9.
In between those two states, the other 48 fall in a positive correlation that, while not perfect, is quite undeniable. According to HSI's Edwin Ivanauskas, the correlation is stronger than that between household income and test scores, which have long been considered to be firmly connected to each other. The ACT scores were gathered from ACT.org, which has the official rankings and averages for the 2013 test, and the speed ratings were taken from Internet analytics firm Akamai's latest report.
In between those two states, the other 48 fall in a positive correlation that, while not perfect, is quite undeniable. According to HSI's Edwin Ivanauskas, the correlation is stronger than that between household income and test scores, which have long been considered to be firmly connected to each other. The ACT scores were gathered from ACT.org, which has the official rankings and averages for the 2013 test, and the speed ratings were taken from Internet analytics firm Akamai's latest report.
Faster internet access means faster internet search results when cheating. Therefore the internet should be banned. /s
Silence is a state of mime.
Cheating over dial-up sucks!
The usual /. refrain of correlation is not causation definately applies here. Mississippi had low test scores long before broadband Internet came along.
http://xkcd.com/552/
i could live a little longer in this prison
That's paramount to the "corn-flake effect". Many people who are involved in car accidents actually ate corn flakes for breakfast. How scary is that?!??
I'll bet almost all of them drank something with H2O in it within the last 24 hours too! It's time we ban this stuff.... For the children!!!
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
This is data mining. If you compare enough things you'll find strange correlations. There is little plausible reason to believe there is an actual causal relationship here.
These are also "irrefutable correlations":
US spending on science, space, and technology correlates with Suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation:
http://www.tylervigen.com/view...
Number people who drowned by falling into a swimming-pool correlates with Number of films Nicolas Cage appeared in
http://tylervigen.com/view_cor...
Per capita consumption of cheese (US) correlates with Number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets:
http://tylervigen.com/view_cor...
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
the Borg is more cohesive with faster Internet. we are closer every day to domination.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Faster internet - more affluent - not black, etc etc etc
You can stop at "more $". That's the real reason why students in MA do better than students in MS.
Not money that's used to buy kids iPads or Surfaces, mind you. Money that's spent to modernize schools built in the 1960s, or tear them down entirely and put up new ones. Money that's spent to pay teachers more, and attract better teaching talent. Money that's spent on the community and infrastructure to make teachers want to live there.
Also, it's much more profitable for the private companies that "public" education relies on these days, when they have a higher density of students in schools. It's simply not practical to have as many students in a school in rural MS as it is in a school in urban MA. The urbanites get better educations because the private companies that do fund raisers, home and school internet connectivity, buses, general contracting on the buildings, etc. are making more money when they have more students in one place. It's the same reason why Verizon rolled out FiOS to the top 30% most densely populated suburbs and left the rest in the dark.
You can't trust private corporations to do anything other than act in their own self interest. The public sector as originally conceived was supposed to fill in the gaps, working under the assumption that all human citizens of the great USA deserve the same opportunity to have access to high quality education and thus high quality jobs. But such an assumption requires you to accept that each human being is meritorious of their own moral standing, just by virtue of the fact that they exist and are living and breathing. Corporations aren't people, and they don't assign any moral standing to anything except their bottom line.
We wanted nice things and we got exactly what we wanted. But you see, if you're not living in urban America, you aren't worthy of moral concern because you aren't worth enough money to our corporate benefactors.
The message is awfully clear. If you want a chance to prosper in today's economy, jam yourself in a tiny apartment and bleat through the herd of thousands through the doors of your local well-funded school. Welcome to The Haves Caste, USA, citizen. You are entity number 126,438,921.
The students who take the ACT are not necessarily representative of the state's population. For example, I took the SAT, and not the ACT, because all the colleges I applied to accepted SAT results, but not all accepted ACT results. Students who were going to the local state school just took the ACT alone. I bet the reverse is true in different states. It doesn't take much thought to see these results are totally meaningless.