TIL: B-S-J-Z (China) in the rankings means Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang.
Instead of testing mainland China as a whole, the OECD allows these four specific provincial-level jurisdictions to represent China in the triennial PISA rankings for 15-year-old students.
It will only amount to 3% of the US population. China’s cut out amounts to 13% percent. A 1.41 billion is a lot of people and I understand they don’t want to skew the results. If just taking account that slice, which a quick search says it’s 180 million people, that reading is more than half of the US population. It’s a matter of scale. I’m sure they can add some other provinces to total the US population and still have a higher score.
TBH, its EVEN more filtered than that. Zhongkao cuts out "dumb" kids. Migrant kids with wrong houkou can't drag down BSJZ scores, i.e. "dumb" kids get filtered out. But dumb is relative, IIRC PISA does ~10 Chinese provinces, even the shit tier ones that don't make BSJZ cuts had global average PISA 20 years ago, i.e. when those places were legit impoverished. Those provinced developed a lot since, their scores should regress towards tier1 mean - relative to growth a third tier city has more now than 1st tier 20 years ago. The main skew is like 20-30% of actually dumb kinds, because they got diverted to vocational, their education fine but less rigourous.
Eitherway, hard to say, but look at proxy indicators, there's fuckload of "dumb" Chinese international students... i.e. those who couldn't hack GaoKao that are basically A students in western tertiary. And as others have mentioned, BSJZ + kids that pass zhongkao is basically more 2+ standard deviation talent pipeline than OCED combined, disproportionately directed at technical tertiary, i.e if you want to know who has most big brains whose going to be doing the cooking in the future, BSJZ is good indcator.
And the correct name in all contexts that matter is "Lake Ontario".
It's almost as if people don't know that "Ontario" is not a Canadian name, it's a native American one, and the province is named after the lake, not the other way around.
It was called "Lake Ontario" before Canada or the US even existed.
One thing that does seem to be incorrect is that Google has a single name on the lake - Lake America, when surely that only applies to the American half. The US-Canadian border runs down the middle of the lake, so unless I'm missing something Trump's renaming only applies to the American half, and the correct way for Google to show it would be with different names for each half of the lake.
That's ridiculous! How do you rename half of a lake!
I say that there are two lakes. It remains for future generations to decide how the two lakes are apportioned. Perhaps each of them are coterminous, with the same boundaries, size and volume, but one is named "Lake America" and one is not. One is a lake in US waters, and the other is in some foreign country.
Perhaps of the two lakes, they are split in twain, and there is an international border running through the middle of these two distinct bodies of water. Perhaps vessels will littorally obtain right of passage in international waters, and undergo customs inspections before they can cross over the somewhat amorphous border between Lake Ontario and Lake America, and vice versa.
That's not really how local naming works. I call Germany Germany but the Germans call it Deutschland. There's not two Germany's, there's just one and I have a different name for it. It really doesn't matter if a geographic object is completely inside, partially inside, or completely outside a country's borders, they have an official or de facto name for it that could differ from what you call it.
If Google maps, or anyone else, is just going to label things in other countries according to the whims of Trump, then where does it end?
If Trump tells Google, and spends taxpayer money, to "officially rename" Ottawa itself "Poopietown", then should they do it?
Maybe we need a constitutional amendment to remove the president's power over place names, given that the founding fathers only considered a malevolent president, not one with the brain of a 5 year old.
You joke, but of course that is exactly the direction we're heading in, where a previously friendly border, both on land and in the water, becomes a hostile one where full border formalities do apply.
I remember years ago driving across the border at Niagara Falls, and just being waved though, no passport required, when I said I was just on a day trip.
I feel like the advice given by IT departments for years was to wipe your device ahead of travel, and restore from backup upon arriving. Or, to take a travel device.
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