One of the card-carrying members of this town’s great and good, Judy Meredith, contributes the following to a Blue Mass Group discussion of Matt Amorello’s arrest: thanks for this ernie (6.00 / 4) so sad for Matt, not a bad fellow at all. I suspect too many police officers are high school bullies who were too stupid for community college and lacked the self control required by organized crime. by: Judy Meredith @ Tue Aug 10, 2010 at 09:09:01 AM CDT I include the entire comment (despite the awkward formatting) so no one can say its taken out of context. This space has not always had a great relationship with the public safety community (examples here and here), but I’ve […]

Countdown to World-Class Schools summarizes 12 actions the incoming governor can take to make our schools the best in the world. All achievable. All for under $50 million. It’s fascinating to watch the “moral” opposition to school choice (even public school choice) of officials who’ve benefited from private educations or now send their kids to private schools. Certainly, President Obama, Governor Patrick, Lieutenant Governor Murray and Ed Secretary Paul Reville all attended pretty special schools, and the President and the Governor exercise this option to school their own kids. Good for them. But don’t parents who have less money also deserve a similar option? (At right is a picture of Milton Academy, where the Governor went.) I say this not […]

One tip for aspiring data hounds — always ask for weighted data. What do I mean? What’s the on-time performance for commuter rail? In NY, it’s 96%! Huzzah, right? Wrong, that’s on the basis of trains, not weighted by passenger. Anecdotal evidence suggests rush-hour trains (which are packed with people) have a much higher rate of delay. By not weighting on-time data by passenger, NY’s on-time performance fails to tell the whole story and fails the credibility test with the most important user group of all — the customers.

Here at Pioneer, we are all for data-driven decision-making, and rely on publicly-available data all the time. But that can be a problem when the data being provided is garbage… or worse. In case you missed, the Globe is in the midst of a slow-motion evisceration of the state’s Probation Department and their article on Sunday was a stunner. It revealed, among other, things that the Probation Department was using a non-standard measure of caseload (measuring all cases open during a calendar year) and when the nationally-accepted standard was put in place, caseload dropped from 167 cases per officer to ‘about 40’. From reading the piece, and the series, its clear that Probation has operated off the grid of oversight […]