Very cool, I did the same thing a while back for the Canadian Parliament. Unfortunately, the party discipline in Canadian politics makes it less interesting.
The problem is that good students are mostly in private schools and specialized programs (international programs) so "regular classes" in public schools contain a lot of low performing students and students with disabilities.
My gf is a public high school teacher in Montreal and they do miracles everyday with the low amount of resources that they have to work with. She has a M.Sc. in her specialization (history), but do mostly special education tasks since the student level are so low.
So if 60% of the 80% condemned to use the public school system are failing to achieve the already lowered standards this is mere nuance?
What you have in Quebec is an elite (both english and french speaking) that gifts their children a private bilingual education with actual competition while they actively deny those rights to the rest of the public. Poor monolingual french speakers are actively screwed from birth to such a degree that they don't even notice how bad it is.
I'm just saying that we must be careful citing CSDM numbers because they represent a special situation. The CSDM have a lot of first generation immigrants, poor students, students with learning disabilities, etc. The middle class students are in good schools in the suburbs or in private schools.
The CSDM in Montreal has such a bad reputation that if you're not accepted in a specialized program (let say, international baccalaureate), you go to a private school if you can afford it (4k$/year). And don't let me start about union rules for new teachers...
On the other hand, if you're a special ed teacher, CSDM is hiring like crazy. Not so much for math, social science, french, English teachers though.
The CSDM is not a special situation at all. You can go to the townships, Lanaudiere, through every Montreal suburb and find the same phenomenon at work.
The root problem is Quebec's monolingual french speakers have been force fed a diet of anti-intellectual nonsense for so long they no longer see the value of education. Hockey is seen as the way out, but failing that the government will always be guilt tripped into paying welfare for them.
This. But this is not because "good students are mostly in private school", it is because public school is just bad.
I am a Quebec resident and I have been, for most of my high school, in a private school. I went one year to a public school: the level of education was SO poor and the students' motivation was the lowest I had ever seen.
There is an huge disrepency between public/private sector and people are trying to cut down private school funding[1].
I've seen both, and public school is a disgrace, no kid should have to go through this. I've seen teachers insulting students (and vice versa), teachers being hangover on a class day and telling the students to read their book, teachers raging against students (and vice versa) and just classes being generally content-less.
EDIT: Not saying we should abolish public school, but it HAS to improve. My experience (and what I have seen of people going into higher eduction) was horrible. Private school has good students because it has (majorly) good teachers (and some selection, I admit), whereas public school has a dominance of bad teachers.
It's still a project from minority government and all institutions/cities can withdraw from it. Montreal(1.65M pop) said that it will not apply the charter in their city.
It still has a long way to go, but it's a good way to change the political agenda and pit rural areas and cities against each other.
The worst thing about this charter is not that it makes a clear separation between church and state (like in France), but rather that some religions are "more equal" than others (for example, the crucifix will remain in the legislative chamber).
So yeah, it's more of a "let's get everybody in the province riled up and angry at each other instead of creating jobs and fixing real problems." And since the separatist option is stuck at 30%, that's pretty much the best the Parti Québecois can do to please their troops.
That's true, but coverage of seminal papers is not that great in Pubmed central from my experience. This may change now that there is a push for all publicly funded research to become open access immediately or after 1 or 2 years.
Very nice and more interesting than the bar charts/graph that other twitter visualization tools give us. It would be really cool (and informative) if you could add a small word cloud when the cursor hovers over a city.
I did a similar non-interactive dataviz a while ago during the big student protests in Quebec this spring. I clustered (using LDA) the tweets talking about the protests and I mapped and identified them.
I'd venture to say that for a shy person the difference isn't necessarily that large, I can understand missing social cues when you are constantly ignoring warning signs just because you are out of your comfort zone.
(that said I will never understand nor defend the scenarios depicted in the article)
I'd venture to say that for a blind non-participant the difference isn't necessarily that large.
Meanwhile, aggression covers a lot of ground, which includes clubbing someone over the head, and generally being a jerk. But the fact that someone uses this word with two "g"s and two "s"s to describe some part of the process of building a happy family does not mean that other people are going to automatically know how to build a happy family after having read the paragraph that uses those words...
It's not the same data, but I did a PCA with the voting record of Canadian MPs. It's a bit old, so it's in flash instead of html5. You can access it here: http://www.votum.ca
It has done in flash, when flash was cool... http://olihb.com/2011/02/27/legislative-explorer/