Testing Nations: Olympics and PISA

This month the British are feeling pleased with themselves, having hosted the 2012 London Olympics successfully and, in terms of medals won, having come third, after the USA and China. But the duration of the games is about two weeks in a cycle of four years which is about 1% of the time. Another and more perennial form of international competition is in academic standards as assessed by PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment. This post attempts to bring recent Olympic and PISA performances together, and to provide some insight into national priorities.

At which point it is worth borrowing a useful concept from physics: that of properties that are intensive or extensive. As a simple example, the volume of a liquid is extensive and increases with the amount present but the liquid’s density stays the same however large or small the amount – the first is an extensive property, the second intensive. By analogy, the number of medals a country wins tends to be ‘extensive’ – a bigger population in which to find outstanding talent – but there is nothing to stop a small country having very high academic standards, which are, in these terms, ‘intensive’.

The Chart below shows the top 25 2012 Olympics countries in rank order (red) and also their 2009 PISA rank (blue). But alongside the Olympic rank is a percentage figure. This is the extent to which the number of medals won by a country differs by more than 10% from the number that would have been predicted taking account of factors such as population size, GDP per capita, past performance and “host-nation advantage” (more about this in the Notes below).

So, the UK, while it ranks 3 in the Olympics, is only ranked 21 in PISA terms. Its total of medals (29 in fact) was 15% higher than expected. By contrast, the Netherlands, Olympics ranking 13, 17% more medals than expected, but educationally is ranked 11th. At the top of the table the USA (medal score predicted to within 2%) lies at 26 in PISA terms. Russia and Kazakhstan also show signs of Olympics overachievement and educational underachievement.

South Korea demonstrates a balanced achievement, fifth in both PISA and Olympics with a small underperformance (3%) in the latter. New Zealand and Australia make an interesting contrast. They rank at eighth and tenth in PISA (perhaps proximity to Asia focusses national minds) but NZ was also able to over perform at the Olympics by 64% to achieve a ranking of 15th, while Australia, again at tenth in London, underperformed by 14%. Canada, an impressive seventh in PISA, lies outside the chart as it came 35th in Olympic rank because, although gaining 18 medals (5% more than expected), 2/3rds were bronze.

The Table below supports the idea of PISA score being ‘intensive’. Those PISA nations in the top 30 but which didn’t make the Olympics top 25 above are listed together with their Olympics ranking a deviation from expected performance. Some nations were not represented in London. The UK and USA are shown in the Table next to their PISA peers, underlining their markedly different Olympics performance.

In terms of national priorities, the Russian and Kazakhstan show the biggest disparities between Olympic and PISA performance. Not too far behind are the US and UK. However, Olympics success depends on identifying and then focussing resources on a small number of suitably talented candidates, whereas PISA reflects a nation’s ability to raise the educational standards of the majority of its population. The UK has excellent schools, particularly in the private sector attended by less than 10% of pupils, but whose alumni were proportionately over-represented in the UK’s Olympics team. The existence of a similar (and possibly self-perpetuating) elite in the US has been discussed here previously.

NOTES ON THE DATA

1. The 2012 Olympics rankings are taken from the standard medal table, ranking countries first in order of gold medals, then silver medals, then bronze medals.

2. The Financial Times (£) combined results from four different econometric models addressing Population, GDP per capita, past performance and “home advantage” and some other factors to predict the total number of medals each nation might be expected to win, and compared this with the actual achievement. The size of any deviation has been expressed here as a percentage of the expected number, but bear in mind that small numbers produce large percentages (eg Singapore and Iran).

3. The 2009 PISA scores for Mathematics, Science and Reading were added and the nations ranked accordingly. Although China appears here as ‘First’ the data has to be regarded sceptically. PISA cites data for Shanghai (First), Hong Kong (2nd) and Macau (17th) – a more representative score for the whole of China might have come out rather lower. The 2012 PISA rankings will be reported in late 2013 and may shed more light.

4.  UK refers to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, known as GB.

Means and Ends

Ross Clark’s article, Our China Syndrome, in the current Spectator (summary here) was sub-headed The claims against swimmer Ye Shiwen reflect irrational suspicion of her country, a theme which he expanded on:

Rarely can a sporting performance have been met with such resentment as that of 16-year-old Ye Shiwen in the 400 metres women’s medley. She had hardly wiped the drops from her goggles before the US swimming coach John Leonard was making coded accusations of drug use, with words such as ‘unbelievable’ and ‘disturbing’. Her offence, it seems, was to have swum a length of the pool faster than an all-American winner of the men’s event, Ryan Lochte.  

… Ye Shiwen had passed the routine drugs test to which all medal winners at the Olympics have been subjected. She wasn’t a drugs cheat after all, …  

Deprived of the opportunity to accuse her of doping, the nation’s Sinophobes changed tack. Maybe she wasn’t on drugs, but she was the product of a ‘brutal training regime’ … Then came the extraordinary accusation that she might have been genetically modified. …  

BBC’s Newsnight devoted its main story to the fantasy that athletes might be having their genes modified to improve their performance — interspersed with clips of Ye Shiwen winning her medals. After 15 minutes of this, the scientists invited on the programme to discuss the issue admitted that there was no evidence it was actually possible to manipulate an athlete’s genes in this way.

There is certainly no question of Ye Shiwen having failed any tests. However, the scientific position may not be as categorical as Clark was assuming. The Times monthly science supplement, Eureka, gave its August issue over to Science and the [Olympic] Games, including an article by Kaya Burgess, Testing times: getting ahead of the cheats, in which she tries to answer the question:

The doping authorities at London 2012 are implementing the most stringent drug testing regime of any Games. But can cheats still slip through?  

… There is little doubt that there are more ways to cheat in sport than ever. Since the British Olympic Association first started working on the Olympic bid, in 1997, performance enhancement has evolved beyond the abuse of steroids and stimulants to include ever-subtler ways of enhancing the body from within. The challenge for UK Anti-Doping (UKAD) is to try, at last, to get one step ahead. This year, every medallist will be tested, and so will about half of all other athletes competing. More than 6,000 samples are expected to be analysed in the course of the Games. But the testers at the Olympic testing laboratory in Harlow have to know what they are looking for.  

… Existing drugs approved for medical use will already be on the radar of the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), which will have analysed the potential for cheats and prepared watertight arguments against those who claim innocent use. What Wada has not known about until now, however, is the vast range of drugs still in secret development by pharmaceutical companies. For the first time, one of those companies, GlaxoSmithKline, has opened its drug-research pipeline to Wada to help officials flag up new or unknown substances that may have found their way into athletes’ hands through other sources. …  

Steve Clarke, GSK’s head of drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics, … cites the example of Balco — the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, near San Francisco — which was found to have sold steroids, growth hormones, testosterone cream and erythropoietin to Major League baseball players as well as Chambers. “They had looked through the literature, come up with a steroid drug that wasn’t marketed anywhere but that had been investigated as a potential at one stage, and they had chemists capable of making that drug,” Clarke says. The result was a drug that Wada didn’t know about and didn’t have a test for. “That’s why athletes got away with it for so long and why THG was known as ‘The Clear’.”

As Burgess concludes, it wouldn’t be sensible to bet against competitors breaking the rules, perhaps under pressure. None of this reflects in any way upon Ye Shiwen, but she does come from a country which plays with a hard ball and where ends seem to justify means. I have posted here before about Chinese hacking and cyber theft, but some more insight into what has been happening was provided by Bloomberg just as the Olympics opened in an article by Michael Riley and Dune Lawrence, Hackers Linked to China’s Army Seen From EU to D.C., which anyone with the slightest interest in the subject should read in full. Apart from the EU and various organisations in Washington DC, the article reports attacks on computers in Canada and India, and:

The networks of major oil companies have been harvested for seismic maps charting oil reserves; patent law firms for their clients’ trade secrets; and investment banks for market analysis that might impact the global ventures of state-owned companies, according to computer security experts who asked not to be named and declined to give more details.  

… Stolen information is flowing out of the networks of law firms, investment banks, oil companies, drug makers, and high technology manufacturers in such significant quantities that intelligence officials now say it could cause long-term harm to U.S. and European economies.

The article revealed that:

Adding a potentially important piece to the puzzle, researcher Joe Stewart, who works for Dell SecureWorks, an Atlanta-based security firm and division of Dell Inc. (DELL), the computer technology company, last year uncovered a flaw in software used by Comment group hackers. Designed to disguise the pilfered data’s ultimate destination, the mistake instead revealed that in hundreds of instances, data was sent to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses in Shanghai. The location matched intelligence contained in the 2008 State Department cable published by WikiLeaks that placed the group in Shanghai and linked it to China’s military.

Perhaps China’s pharma technology base is nothing like as advanced as their cyber capability, but if it is they could probably run Olympic-sized rings around UKAD and Wada, if they set out to do so. The scope in the long term for innovations of all sorts, overt and covert, in a country in which even a fraction of its population reaches the PISA standards recorded for Shanghai’s 15-year olds in 2009 will be immense.

On the high wire with Boris

Now that the Olympics are underway in London, they provide an irresistible opportunity for the advancement of its Mayor. Boris Johnson having been re-elected in May (at 51.5% of the vote on a 38% turnout), his supporters are staking out claims while the going is good. For example, before the games started Iain Martin provided the cover story for the July/August Standpoint, I came, I saw, I’ll conquer, Boris Johnson covets supreme power, and told us that “… we should take the Conservative clown prince seriously”. And “To some in the Conservative Party he is a scheming charlatan with no policies. To others his star power could be worth harnessing”. But it was Benedict Brogan, deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph, who stirred it up yesterday in an article headlined As donors stampede to back Boris, the PM can only watch.

Brogan’s article didn’t say much that was new: the Conservatives now think they are unlikely to win the next election, George Osborne is a write-off, “… the normal rules of politics do not apply to Boris”. But there were a few sentences which made it of real interest:

I hear, [Boris Johnson] met Rupert Murdoch recently to discuss how his candidacy might be promoted, and has invited the media tycoon to join him at the Olympics. It is said that Mr Murdoch wants to get rid of Mr Cameron. Westminster has noted the Sun’s growing enthusiasm for Boris, and how it contrasts with the vitriol the newspaper now reserves for Messrs Cameron and Osborne.

A few sceptics alighted on the “It is said that”. No-one, as far as I know, has picked up the text of the URL for the article, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/benedictbrogan/100173707/boris-is-unstoppable-and-now-murdoch-wants-him-to-lead-the-tory-party/, which suggests that the original headline was rather more pointed than the one the Telegraph finally ran with. Indeed, Brogan later ran an emollient blog piece Whatever it brings, the reshuffle is just part of a wider recovery programme for David Cameron. Although this morning, for obvious reasons, he took the opportunity to tweet:
 

And then blogged again for the Telegraph: David Cameron's Olympics torment, reporting from the beach volleyball in Horse Guards:

… The beach volleyball MC has a line of patter he deploys several times a night. "We've just had a call. It seems the Prime Minister is trying to get an early night and wants less noise. What do we say to that?" Cue a roar of mockery and plenty of boos. … Every night then the PM is being mocked, and there's no sign of that political bounce he might have hoped for. For Boris, certainly. … But the Prime Minister must be wondering whether any Olympic gold will come his way.

All good fun and it helps fill the papers and websites, as did the Michael Gove love-in for a while back in February. More seriously, YouGov asked people in early May (during the London mayoral election) and again on 31July/1 August what the impact of Boris Johnson’s taking Cameron’s place would be on their voting. In May there was no significant difference: Con/Lab/LD/Other moved from 32/40/10/15 to 32/41/11/15. Now, during the Olympiad, the effect is significant: from 34/40/10/17 to 37/38/10/14. But when asked the normal straightforward voting intention question (and presumably unprompted with the leaders’ names), the same sample of voters yielded 32/43/10/15!

Examining the YouGov data it can be seen that the current movement towards Boris is: among women, but not significant among men; among the over 40s, but not under; among C2DEs, not ABCs. Just as interesting is the polling carried out for Lord Ashcroft later in May, extracted below:

Of course, Boris Johnson is in the happy position of being popular but subject to little critical scrutiny. If he were to become an MP again, let alone party leader, various aspects of his life might become better-known, and at the same time he would have to relaunch himself as a serious character capable of providing answers with real content to questions about the economy, or Iran, or the future energy needs of the UK, or Trident replacement, or a load of other difficult issues. The public’s evaluation of him as a possible future Prime Minister may not be as tolerant as it is to London’s Mayor during an Olympics which seems to be going well. Perhaps the last words should be from today’s The Times (£), reporting on a slight mishap:

Getting stuck on a zip wire, while clutching two Union Jacks and shouting “get me a ladder”, was, it turns out, one of [the relatively few things Boris Johnson could have done yesterday to make the national papers]. The Mayor of London was suspended about six metres up for five minutes as he tried out a 320 metre (1,050ft) zip line at Victoria Park yesterday afternoon. The wire apparently sagged so much as he sailed along that he lost momentum about 20m from the end. … As the incident trended on Twitter, David Cameron summed it up perfectly. Speaking at a health policy summit, he said: “If any other politician anywhere in the world got stuck on a zip wire it would be a disaster. For Boris it’s a triumph. He defies all forms of gravity.”

Perhaps the Conservatives will go into the next election with Boris and take the risk of “lost momentum about 20m from the end”.

UPDATE 3 AUGUST

In the press the Boris coverage  continues, amplified because of the Olympics and probably approaching its peak.  Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian today is in the incredulous-but-not prepared-to-rule-it-out camp.  Philip Collins in The Times is totally unconvinced:

None of this [the Olympics fun] means that Mr Johnson is a credible Prime Minister. The only way back to popularity for the Tory party is for David Cameron to improve his personal best, not to pretend that there is any prospect of salvation from the Olympic Village idiot.

UPDATE 4 AUGUST

Contrasting views today from Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph and Janan Ganesh, newly arrived at the Financial Times. Moore, when editor of the Telegraph, employed Boris Johnson, so his opinion should be insightful.  He prefers ‘post-modern’ to the ‘postmodern’ I used here in the same context a few days ago:

As you could tell from the London Olympic opening ceremony, we now have a post-modern public culture. We are ironical, eclectic, genre-subverting, fusion-cooking, mixing up Chelsea Pensioners and lesbian kisses. We are high-brow and low-brow at the same time. The only politician who “gets” any of this is Boris. He can mix Virgil and James Bond, a posh accent and street cred, conservative politics and a liberal spirit. Mr Cameron is the moderniser, but Boris is the post-moderniser.  

To the many – possibly including myself – who would prefer our politics plainer, all this may seem footling. What has it got to do with righting our ghastly economic wrongs? Very little, perhaps. Boris Johnson’s instinctive, freedom-loving, anti-statist optimism is attractive, but certainly does not amount to a policy. Besides, the fashion for writing off Mr Cameron has gone far further than the facts warrant. … All I would say, though, is that conventional politics is now failing more comprehensively than at any time since the 1930s, and that Boris Johnson is the only unconventional politician in the field.

Ganesh does not mince his words in the FT (£), arguing:

If a Johnson ascendancy is improbable in the near future, it is far from certain in the long run either. By the time Mr Cameron does depart, the field of potential replacements will be rather more crammed than it is now. Michael Gove, the reforming education secretary, is coming to be seen as the government’s biggest success story. ...

By far the biggest threat to Mr Johnson, however, is not any other individual. It is the pitiless scrutiny that comes with national politics, a realm so much more demanding than London’s relatively weak mayoralty that it barely makes sense to describe Mr Cameron and Mr Johnson as being in the same line of work.  

… Winning in London is not the same as winning in Bolton West, Birmingham Edgbaston or many of the other seats that the Tories failed to secure in 2010. Running City Hall is not the same as running a state that occupies half of gross domestic product. Mr Johnson is brilliant, magnetic, optimistic and cosmopolitan, and he knows how to use a bully pulpit. He is, in short, perfect for the job he already has.

  Surely Ganesh is aware of the Peter Principle by which people tend to rise above their level of competence?  Perhaps this only applies to advancement in organisational  hierarchies rather than the greasy pole ascended by politicians.  Ganesh, by the way, has a biography of George Osborne coming out in October.

UPDATE 5 AUGUST

This story is obviously going to be long-distance!  Today Johnson’s biographer, Sonia Purnell, writing in the Observer, regards him as far from perfect in his current job:

While his stint as mayor has undoubtedly been brilliant for Project Boris, it is far from clear that London has equally benefited. The capital has some of the highest public transport fares in the world, yet offers an unreliable service. Its police force has undergone its worst internal crisis for a generation, with the mayor burning through three commissioners in as many years. The Boris Bike hire scheme, while popular, is a financial swamp costing more than £100m; we are in danger of breaching EU rules on pollution; the cycling death rate is rising; there are disturbing trends in some areas of crime. Does this qualify him to become prime minister in times like these?  

Boris Johnson is unparalleled in politics in terms of self-promotion and even occasionally cheering us up. He is hugely clever and politically astute. But after more than four years as mayor, he has yet to prove himself in action, let alone as a contender to be prime minister.

She also regards Johnson as lacking in team spirit and offers a biographer’s insight into his personality:

And yet for all his apparent friendliness, Johnson is rarely a friend. In fact, although many might describe themselves as a pal, they are usually mistaken. As a critic once observed, as with Lord Palmerston, Johnson "does not have friends, merely interests". Indeed, when questioned, these self-professed "friends" often admit that they have seen the mayor socially perhaps only a couple of times in the past few years. Those who are no longer "useful" have not seen him at all.  

Most admit they have rarely if ever conducted a lengthy conversation with Johnson; he is not one to share a pint at the pub or a club with a mate, for instance, and also only likes to run alone. One former female aide recalls how she dreaded car journeys with him as conversation would either be painfully stilted or simply non-existent. At gatherings, it has been his habit to avoid "one to ones" and escape the embarrassing intimacy of such encounters by constantly introducing people to someone else. Even at private dinner parties, senior Tories say he will offer to make a speech to avoid the agony of cosy two-way chats at the table and the possibility of direct questions. He prefers to be in "transmit" mode rather than "receive". It is as if he erects the highest walls around himself to avoid any of us really getting to know him.

Some of these traits are associated with only children and it has been said that an only child is a special case of the first-born child. The last first-born child to become British Prime Minister was Edward Heath, a statistical curiosity discussed with handedness in a previous post. The Sunday Times (£) covers the story so far and adds some polling of its own:

A poll by YouGov for The Sunday Times today suggests he has some way to go. Asked who they would most like to see replace Cameron if he stepped down before the next election, 24% backed Johnson, ahead of William Hague, the foreign secretary, on 14%, David Davis on 6% and George Osborne, the chancellor, on 3%. Yet such change might make little difference to the party’s electoral fortunes: while 19% said this would make them more likely to vote Tory, 17% said it would not.

They also look at possible routes to the top:

– David Cameron fails to win a majority in 2015 and Tory MPs are desperate for Boris, the king across the water. Cameron hangs on as leader for a few months to allow an orderly transition. An obliging MP is persuaded to give up his seat quickly and Johnson returns to the Commons via a by-election. He wins the ensuing leadership contest. 

– Cameron narrowly wins the election but announces he won’t serve a full term. He stays on until 2017 or 2018, giving Johnson plenty of time to finish his term as mayor, get back into parliament and win the fight to succeed him. 

– Johnson stands in 2015 — despite having said before there is no chance of his doing so — insisting he can be both an MP and mayor. This puts him in a position to make an eventual move on No 10 whatever the election result.

Postmodernising the monarchy

The London Olympics Opening Ceremony on 27 July, masterminded by Danny Boyle, is generally judged to have been a great success, at least in the UK. How much of it people in the other 200-odd Olympics participating countries could understand, one has to wonder. Come to that, how much of the content did people here fail to appreciate, whether they were in the minority at the ceremony or in the millions watching on TV? Only when looking at the BBC website afterwards did I see the two yellow submarines.
 

Apparently French viewers were told that the image of a baby in the children’s hospital sequence was a tribute to the Scottish pioneer of obstetric ultrasound – I don’t think the BBC commentators said that. And apparently viewers in the US were left wondering whether Kenneth Branagh’s Isambard Kingdom Brunel was Abe Lincoln without the beard!

Last November I posted about the V&A Postmodernism exhibition, noting  US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous admission in 1964 that while he couldn’t define hard-core pornography, “I know it when I see it”, and that something similar could be said about postmodernism. Actually the V&A offered the following definition:

The word is notoriously difficult to define, though students may have some sense of its meaning: ironic self-awareness; style that includes historical reference; a turn to decoration and ornament. For the purposes of the show at the V&A, we have interpreted the term quite literally. Postmodernism is simply what happened right after the ‘death of modernism’ – that is, when modernism lost its position as the dominant style in European and American visual culture. The exhibition therefore looks at the moment when certain ideals about architecture and design – represented by Bauhaus objects, International Style buildings, simple and functional clothing, and the clarity of modern graphics and typography – were overthrown in favour of newly permissive, liberated, and expressive tendencies . Because postmodernism comes from this moment of rupture, it feels explosive even thirty years later. It opened up a broad but uncertain terrain, and designers and artists associated with the term tended to be interested in ambiguity and mediation (the reproduction and even the selling of things, not just the making of them).

To me the Opening Ceremony was certainly postmodern. It was full of “historical reference” but not too rigorous about it. For example, Brunel is best known as a mid-19th century railway constructor. But that was at the end of the industrial revolution which had begun about 1750 and had relied on the canal system initially – I didn’t see any bargees. There were plenty of “newly permissive, liberated, and expressive tendencies” – too much Britpop for some tastes possibly, along with the lesbian kisses. And the whole modern Olympiad is up to its armpits in the “selling of things” for sure.

But as a piece of “ambiguity”, the Opening Ceremony’s short film sequence Happy and Glorious (words from the UK and others’ national anthem) directed by Boyle is surely worth some consideration. Bond, played by Daniel Craig, is summoned to Buckingham Palace by Her Majesty (playing herself, HM) to escort her by helicopter to the Olympic Stadium. The helicopter passes over various London landmarks and then Bond and the Queen (played by stuntmen) appear to jump into the stadium with parachutes. As the film ended, HM appeared in the Stadium and formally opened the Games.

On Her Majesty's Service

Most people, once they had got over their amazement that the Queen was HM and not Helen Mirren, seemed to think that it was a wonderful example of the British laughing at themselves, not taking things too seriously and so on. Coincidentally, it was in the year of her Coronation (1953) that the first of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, Casino Royale, was published. The first Bond film, Dr No, appeared in 1962 followed by the sequence which has continued to generate billions ($ or £) in box office receipts. When Bond first appeared as a fictional character, his parent organisation, MI6 (or more properly the Secret Intelligence Service), was not officially acknowledged. So when in 1963 Fleming gave his tenth Bond novel the title On Her Majesty's Secret Service (filmed in 1969), the reference to the sovereign was firmly in the realm of fiction. In 1994 SIS ‘came in from the cold’ and now even has a website. Its Chief (reputedly known as ‘C’, eg in Sarah Helm’s Loyalty) has become a semi-public figure who occasionally gives discreet speeches to select gatherings and briefs notables as varied as Mitt Romney and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on aspects of SIS’s work. Bond and the Queen’s helicopter flight didn’t seem to go near Terry Farrell’s postmodernist Thames-side building at Vauxhall Cross which is now occupied by SIS. A popular subject for holiday snaps by London tourists, it is left somewhat worse for wear during the 23rd Bond film, Skyfall (UK release in October).

In recent Bond films the Chief’s role (called ‘M’) has been played by Judi Dench (above). Fortunately, the only queens Dench has played in her other films are Victoria and Elizabeth I, or it might all have become just a bit too confusingly postmodern for such a pre-modern arrangement as a constitutional monarchy.