Quebec beats Sweden in school performance

Back in Sweden one of the first things to meet me was the local school kids substituting their lunch at the Coop supermarket at Trollebergsvägen in Lund. Some of them even smoked in my yard, unwilling to move. "Endast Sverige svenska tonåringar har" ("Swedish teenagers occur in Sweden only"), I thought and went on. The day after - that is today - it is in the news that according to the new Pisa-ranking, Swedish 15-year-old students' performance in maths, science and reading is declining considerably. We are now below average (we used to be above). Canada, on the other hand, is still above average. And according to the Huffington post, Quebecers perform even better. Swedish students skip questions they don't understand. Canadians, and Quebeers in particular, appear to work harder.

In Canada and Quebec authority is respected. This is not the case in Sweden. Furthermore, the basic stuff att school: "läsa, räkna, skriva" (reading, maths and writing) is no longer attractive. It takes time and patience, at any level.


http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/12/03/pisa-results-canada-student-rankings_n_4376190.html
http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/sverige-samst-i-klassen/

Winter and leaving

This is my last week in Montreal, for this time. Tuesday and Wednesday I ran my experiments. It went well, overall, although today I have the feeling I just started, which is actually true - this was my first lab experiment ever. In March I will return to Montréal to participate in a workshop on voting experiments. By then I will have some material from Sweden too. I am looking forward to merging the two perspectives.

Répétition générale

On Monday 18 November I will conduct a first test of my experiment on voting and coordination at Cirano experimental lab in Montréal. It will be real fun to see how the game works out in practice. At this first event there will be mainly colleagues participating.

Then I have another week to make the final revisions for the actual sessions. There are a great number of details that needs to be fixed in an experiment, for example the number of seconds to show a screen, the font size and whether to shuffle preferences or not. Timing is as important as in radio braodcasting - there has to be a flow, but it should not be stressful.

Elections in the city of Montréal

Today is Election Day in Montréal. In the district of Mile End 11 o' clock in the morning the line was long to put one's ballot in the box. For an outsider it is hard to get an overview of the candidates and parties at the municipal level. The division between left and right is not so clear still there seems to be no centre. Candidates matter more than parties. Campaigning has been going on in the streets for some weeks via posters of the faces of the main candidates. It is up to the voter to seek information.

Polling station École Saint-Louis, Mile End

Citrouilles and tango

Now it is autumn for real in Montreal: cold wind, gloves needed. Still the colors are bright and the markets are full of apples from Honey Crisp to Macintosh and Lobo, carrots in different colors and, approaching Halloween, lots of "citrouilles" - pumpkins. The colors of the houses in Plateau Mont Royal where I live are also distinct so walking or cycling in October Montreal is nice.

Otherwise, I have taken some tango steps during the weekend. Tango takes technique, pondus and smoothness. I am glad to have started.

At Jean Talon market, Montréal

Programming in z-tree

For the moment I am working on constructing a lab experiment on coalitions, coordination and voting. This means I have to learn how to program a lab experimental session in a data program called z-tree. I have some resistance learning new programming language. However, after some time and effort it becomes more fun, learning how to be careful with commas, colons etcetera.

The whole lab experimental thing is a bit risky, since you don't really know how it is going to work out and it certainly costs time and money. In fact, I presented the first preliminary design a year ago, and now the research process has landed in what I hope a doable experiment. I aim to run the first experiments in November. A part of it is too see what happens: theory is theory, practice practice.

In Munro's land

I was glad this morning when I heard that Canadian writer Alice Munro got the Nobel prize. I read one of her short stories books when I was taking quantitative courses in Ann Arbor in the US last summer. Especially, I was struck by a story that took place on a train in vast Canada. I got a feeling for the landscape and the mentality, the sea and the grass. I wanted to go somewhere similar. For the moment I am living in Canada's most densely populated area (Plateau Mont-Royal in Montreal), still, you have a sense of that something is going on out there, far away. There is space and place. In November I will get the chance to get a train through Ontario myself.

Like many others I am impressed by Alice Munro's effective style, and my experience from reading her is that you realize that something is going on but if you read too fast you may have missed a detail, or two, so you'd better go back, to confirm what you already knew by sentiment. The book I have read is "Runaway". I was not taken by all stories, but the three-part Chance to Silence got me.