(cross-posted on politicalmammal.com).
In December, I received a message from a clerk at the Supreme Court asking whether I could customize our Visual History of the Supreme Court as a present for a Justice. I was happy to do so, and delivered a special version to him in time for the holidays. Because of this, I recently got a chance to take a private tour of the Court. To be honest, my main curiosity about the Court building was not about the room where the Justices hear the arguments. I had had the good fortune of watching my brother-in-law argue a case there some years ago. Rather, I was really interested in seeing something I had read about, the basketball court on the top floor of the building. I really wanted a chance to take a shot at one of the hoops up there.

So I waited patiently through the mundane aspects of the tour, the marble, the statuary, the special chairs for the president and other visiting dignitaries, the decorated ceilings, the beautiful law library rendered somewhat obsolete by computers, the symbolic carvings, the portraits of former justices, and all the fancy rooms and corridors. The clerk was very poised and knowledgeable and I imagined him as a judge or elected official down the road. It was nice to see that my posters were still on sale at the gift shop. I asked the clerk how the court would rule on the constitutionality of the Affordable Health Care Act, but he gave me no indication. He did say that the Justice was very happy with the print and that they had framed it nicely.

Finally we arrived at the basketball court, next to a weight room on the far less elegant, comparatively grungy top level of the building, and I felt more at home. Without seeking formal permission, I sought out a loose basketball, headed to the free throw line, and, though wearing my down coat, I took a shot.

I had years of preparation for that moment. I had often stayed after school in 2nd grade to play basketball on the cracked concrete court at Flatirons Elementary school in Boulder, Colorado. I played countless hours of one on one with my brother and three-on-three with the neighbor kids at the backyard court up my alley on 10th Street. As far as I know, I still hold the season record for highest free-throw shooting percentage in the after-school basketball league at my elementary school (9/12 or 75%). We had some makeshift hoops over the years in Vermont as well. And clutch free-throw shooting is apparently a family tradition. I remember my dad telling me that he won a free-throw shooting contest at his Brooklyn high school. My basketball preparation also included being a substitute my junior high school team and intramural play in high school, college, and graduate school, not to mention playing Sunday morning to this day with a fine group of increasingly long-in-the-tooth guys. Unfortunately I’ve been really struggling with my shot lately.

Anyhow, despite the intense pressure of the moment, I swished my shot.

My friend Mark, who accompanied me on the tour, is my witness.

So I now have a real claim to fame. A perfect shooting percentage at “the highest court in the land.”

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From Chris Blattman’s blog today: “If you thought regular grade inflation was bad…”

Loyola students are having difficulty getting jobs. In response, did the administration consider dropping tuition? Nope. Instead, they just gave everybody an extra third of a grade — retroactively, no less. That’s not just inflation; that’s a rewriting of history.

Click here for the full story.

Chris also links to Jun Ishii, who works on analyzing how SAT prep courses affect college admissions.

[On a sidenote, we're registering with Technorati today- claim code 2PYF283NH9G8.]

Last week, the New York Times’ Economix blog posted about some interesting research on grade inflation and its effect on the job market and grad school acceptance. The post was accompanied by a nice graphic showing the evolution of grade inflation over time.

For the first half of the 20th century, grading at private schools and public schools rose more or less in tandem. But starting in the 1950s,  grading at public and private schools began to diverge. Students at private schools started receiving significantly higher grades than those received by their equally-qualified peers — based on SAT scores and other measures — at public schools.

In other words, both categories of schools inflated their grades, but private schools inflated their grades more. The chart below shows average G.P.A.’s from 1930 to 2006. Gray dots represent individual schools’ average G.P.A’s. The blue and green lines represent the average G.P.A. for each school type — public or private — over time:

Gray dots on their graph represent individual data points, and colored lines indicate aggregated trends.

(Click to view full size.)

The Times continues, “The authors [of the report] suggest that these laxer grading standards may help explain why private school students are over-represented in top medical, business and law schools and certain Ph.D. programs: Admissions officers are fooled by private school students’ especially inflated grades.”

Click here to read the full post from the New York Times.

The rise and fall of Tiger Woods (thus far, at least) — click for full view:

UPDATE: Commenter Brian F. asked for “a similar graph but with wins and finishes per tournament (rather than raw totals).” I added a line to the chart representing percentage of tournaments won; it uses the secondary Y axis on the right side of the graph. Click for full view. Thanks for the comment!

[Source for raw numbers: Wikipedia]

I had the distinct pleasure this morning of engaging in a somewhat quirky and energetic phone conversation with Richard Saul Wurman. Wurman is the person who, back in the 1970s, coined the term “information architect.” He casts himself as an iconoclast, doing only what he wants to do. For example, he says that the TED talks he started were an “indulgence”—not a concept.

If you do not know him, you should. Richard has recently completed his 82nd book (I own INFORMATIONANXIETY2 and a few others). He is an accomplished guy who has done a lot to help make information more accessible, and now has the freedom to do exactly what he wants. I am envious of his current projects—he has a deal with Nissan to put together 40 short (90-second) web films. He partners with radicalmedia (of “The Fog of War,” among others) and ESRI on www.192021.com. He still owns TEDMed (he sold TED).

When he sent me a note after seeing our print, A Visual History of the Supreme Court, I was delighted at the opportunity to talk. Our conversation topics ranged quite a bit, but a couple of things stuck with me: first, about career choice: you “have to know it is the right thing to do;” and second, about information: “to embrace ignorance.” When I mentioned to him, in response to one of his projects on population, that the world’s growing population was definitely a problem, he responded quickly that the problem is one “of understanding.”

All in all, it was a conversation that I would love to continue in person.