Want to know why it takes so long to get your order at Starbucks? I can
give you 170,000 reasons, but new CEO Brian Niccol wants to cut those down
as part of his turnaround plan for the troubled purveyor of coffee-based
beverages. It also might shorten those wait lines that have
grown notoriously long.
In an
open letter
Tuesday to the company and customers alike, Niccol admitted that "there’s a
shared sense that we have drifted from our core" because some stores
"especially in the U.S. — we aren’t always delivering" on the Starbucks
experience as "a gathering space, a community center." "We’re
committed to elevating the in-store experience — ensuring our spaces reflect
the sights, smells and sounds that define Starbucks. Our stores will be
inviting places to linger, with comfortable seating, thoughtful design and a
clear distinction between 'to-go' and 'for-here' service."
Niccol's
first step in improving that experience is making sure customers get their
order "on time, every time."
That's a tall order. Or is that a
Trenta? Whenever my wife orders her beloved Starbucks chai, I have no idea
what the words she uses mean.
A couple of weeks ago I
wrote
that I had no idea until reading a Wall Street Journal report "that there are
'at least 170,000 different ways to customize' your Starbucks order. If Niccol
wants to bring costs down, a little less variety might go a long way."
Having a background in science and statistics, I'm well aware of the power of a few different options to multiply into many thousands of options through combinations and permutations. A few different kinds of coffee, tea and chai, a dozen or so possible additives, at several levels of addition each, a few drink sizes. Sometimes it takes more time to specify the drink than to make it.
It doesn't matter to me, I rarely go to Starbucks anymore, when Dunkin' Donuts is less turns off the main road and has better apple fritters.
Disruptions to in-person learning created a severe decline in math performance across the country and state. In Baltimore, just 7% of elementary and middle school students scored proficient in math during the 2021-22 school year, the first statewide exam since the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns.
Statewide, students who scored proficient in math — a measure of students who meet grade-level standards on the state exam — plummeted to a level described by the new state superintendent as “abysmal.”
To reverse the trend, Joan Dabrowski, Baltimore’s chief academic officer, and her team launched a five-year math improvement plan in May 2023, focusing on teaching in small groups using a new curriculum.
The improvement plan’s target is for 25% of students to be proficient in math by the 2026-27 school year, nearly triple the percentage of students performing at or above grade level.
“We’ve set very ambitious goals that we want to hit,” Dabrowski said.
The latest round of state test results is raising alarm in Baltimore City Schools. Project Baltimore found that 40% of Baltimore City high schools, where the state exam was given, did not have any students score proficient in math. Not one student.
“This is educational homicide,” said Jason Rodriguez, deputy director of People Empowered by the Struggle, a Baltimore-based nonprofit.
In 2021, the group held rallies calling on Baltimore City Schools CEO Dr. Sonja Santelises to resign over low test scores, falling graduation rates, and a lack of transparency. Now, after seeing what Project Baltimore discovered, Rodriguez is renewing those calls.
“There is no excuse,” he said. “We have a system that's just running rogue, and it starts at the top.”
Fox45 obtained unredacted state test results for every school in Baltimore City through a source within the school system, and the results are hard to believe.
Students took the tests in the spring of 2023, just a few months ago. Project Baltimore found 13 Baltimore City high schools where not one student who took the state math test scored proficient in math. Not one student.
Last school year, Baltimore City Schools received $1.6 billion from taxpayers, the most ever. The district also received $799 million in Covid relief funding from the federal government. And still, not a single student tested at 13 City high schools scored proficient on the state math test.
Well, at least the teachers and administrators are getting paid, which is basically all their job requires.
A smorgasbord of articles on science I've been hoarding for a while. First, a
conversation between Dr. Jordan B Peterson and Dr. Bjørn Lomborg. Generally, I
see them talk past each other, both coming from fields with heavy jargon. I'm
more of a Lomborg guy myself, as much as I admire Peterson's bravery in the
face of the woke mob: The World is Not Ending | Bjørn Lomborg and Jordan Peterson
A new report alleges the Associated Press took millions of dollars in
donations and used it to fund its
“climate crisis” coverage.
The Associated Press took $8 million in donations to fund
climate coverage in 2022, with the news cooperative and several other major
media publications engaged in dubious claims about climate change, according
to a new, exclusive year-end report.
The “Climate Fact Check 2022”
report, presented by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), the Heartland
Institute, the Energy & Environmental Legal Institute, the Committee for a
Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), and the International Climate Science Coalition
(ICSC), stated that “climate alarmists” and members of the media engaged in
claims about the relationship between manmade emissions and natural disasters,
claims that clashed with “reality and science.”
In February, the
Associated Press admitted that they would assign more than 24 journalists
across the globe to cover “climate issues” after receiving more than $8
million over three years from various organizations.
Over the past few months, I have been exploring the ideological capture of our
scientific institutions.
I have reviewed the mainstream media’s
roll is strangling
rigorous scientific debate. I have explored how
government agencies block access
to important taxpayer-funded databases if they assert a scientist’s research
may enter “forbidden” territory.
I, along with many others, have
warned that the commandeering of science to push social, environmental, and
corporate agendas would have a tsunami of unintended consequences. The
scientific journal Nature has noted one of the most significant repercussions
of ideological capture: The death of scientific innovation.
The
journal recently published an analysis of a report that showed the proportion
of publications that send a field in a new direction (i.e., innovation) has
plummeted over the past half-century.
Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the
mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely to
incrementally push science forward than to veer off in a new direction and
render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed
the same trend.
“The data suggest something is changing,” says
Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and
a co-author of the analysis, which was published on 4 January in Nature. “You
don’t have quite the same intensity of breakthrough discoveries you once
had.”
I have degrees in geology and chemistry. My son is getting a
degree in physics. So, for me, the graph charting the absolute plunge in
physical science “disruption” is chilling.
Adam Mastroianni,
The rise and fall of peer review
"Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a
great thing" Been there done that, both at the reviewer and the reviewee, and
the system is flawed. But advancement in science pretty much depends on
getting papers (and grant proposals) through peer review. It's going to be a
tough system to change.
For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself.
The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no
control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking
consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run,
and it included every scientist on Earth.
Most of those folks
didn’t even realize they were in an experiment. Many of them, including me,
weren’t born when the experiment started. If we had noticed what was going on,
maybe we would have demanded a basic level of scientific rigor. Maybe nobody
objected because the hypothesis seemed so obviously true: science will be
better off if we have someone check every paper and reject the ones that don’t
pass muster. They called it “peer review.”
The
Great Barrier Reef
is one of the planet’s natural jewels, stretching for more than 2,300km
along Australia’s north-east.
But as well as being a bucket-list
favourite and a heaving mass of biodiversity across 3,000 individual reefs,
the world heritage-listed organism is at the coalface of the climate
crisis.
We all know that math is racist. It is used to enforce Whiteness on people
by emphasing universalism (there is a truth) and requiring precision
(apparently your ability to be precise is highly dependent upon melanin
content in the skin). It is a construct that is inherently anti-radical as
it assumes some inherent structure to the universe, and that there are
“right” answers and wrong ones.
That, at least, is
the contention of some mathematics educators, including
Dr. Rochelle Gutierrez of the University of Illinois at Urbana. Dr Gutierrez teaches not only Latina/Latino studies, but is also a
professor at the School of Education, focusing on curriculum and
instruction.
In other words, she is one of the people who trains
students to become teachers.
One might be tempted to think that there is a benign intention
behind Dr. Gutierrez’ attempts to reform the way that math is taught to
students of color. After all, statistics indicate that many such students
are having difficulty in math classes and have fallen behind their white
compatriots. To the extent that is the case it obviously behooves us to
understand why that is and find ways to remedy it.
But no, that
is not Rochelle’s approach to the issue at all. The inability of students of
color to perform well in math indeed is connected to the way that math is
being taught, but that is because math itself is White. So trying to get
students up to standard in White math is White Supremacist, and should be
stopped.
I subjected myself to a loooooonnnnnnggggggg video of
Gutierrez discussing her approach with mathematics educators, and needless
to say it is not only filled with buzzwords appropriate to the genre, but
vile ideas about racial differences between students. She doesn’t quite come
out and say it, but apparently students of color can’t do math because they
are not White and are resisting Whiteness. And this is a good thing,
apparently.
This confusion applies to all of the black keys, but in this post, I’ll be talking about the one between D and E. You could think of it as a raised D, in which case it’s called D-sharp. You could also think of it as a lowered E, in which case it’s called E-flat. Guitars don’t have black and white keys, so when I was a feral self-taught musician, I just thought of that note as the eleventh fret on the E string, the sixth fret on the A string, the first fret on the D string, etc. I pretty much always called it E-flat, regardless of context. I have since learned to use the correct name depending on context, but it still feels arbitrary sometimes, especially outside of diatonicism. If you are in B major, the note is supposed to be called D-sharp, and if you are in B-flat major, the note is supposed to be called E-flat. But what if you’re in A blues? How are you supposed to spell it then? And what difference does it make anyway?
The usual answer is that you are only supposed to use each letter name once in any given scale. All major scales are considered to be based on C major, and you are supposed to preserve the white keys’ names, modified by accidentals as needed. So for example, you spell the B major scale like so: B, C-sharp, D-sharp, E, F-sharp, G-sharp, A-sharp. If you were to spell it as B, D-flat, E-flat, E, G-flat, A-flat, B-flat, it would sound exactly the same, but it would be harder to read, and you would lose points on your music theory exam.
Maybe spelling B major using flats instead of sharps is hard to read in notation, but what musical difference does it make? In the present day, the answer is, none whatsoever. Five hundred years ago, however, it would have made a very big difference. Before the advent of temperament systems, D-sharp and E-flat were two different notes. They weren’t just written differently; they sounded different. You can compare the historical versions of these notes yourself in this track I made. . . .
And then goes into a rather long but somehow understandable (to a person who knows math well, but not music, so much) explanation as to why they really were different notes. But as he points out, it really doesn't matter so much to fretted instruments, where you can't really have two different notes. So I sent this my personal musical assistant, Alex, and asked how this affected the guitar playing and he replied:
Well theoretically you can tune a guitar kind of mean tempered, and there are guitars with microtonal frets to play the difference between say c# and Db. But in actual practice, good players (I'd like to think I could) bend notes slightly all the time to make things more in tune on equal tempered guitar tunings. But sometimes if I'm recording something, i will mess with the tuning to get the 3rds more in tune, it works if you're playing something that stays in key and you don't do much other than open chords
In the name of equity, the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is
moving toward making sweeping changes to the K-12 math curriculum statewide,
which includes removing options for advanced math courses prior to 11th
grade.
Loudoun County school board member Ian Serotkin
wrote on Facebook about the changes.
"[A]s currently planned,
this initiative will eliminate ALL math acceleration prior to 11th grade,"
he said. "That is not an exaggeration, nor does there appear to be any
discretion in how local districts implement this. All 6th graders will take
Foundational Concepts 6. All 7th graders will take Foundational Concepts 7.
All 10th graders will take Essential Concepts 10. Only in 11th and 12th
grade is there any opportunity for choice in higher math courses."
He learned about the changes this week at the Curriculum and Instruction Committee meeting, during which they received a briefing from Virginia Mathematics Pathways Initiative (VMPI) staff. One of the images he shared explains what the VMPI’s goals are. Listed first? “Improve equity in mathematics learning opportunities.”
“23 states and 2- and 4-year colleges are participating in this initiative,” the VMPI infographic states.
I was not a particularly good match student in high school. I was able enough, but didn't exert myself, settling for the gentlemen's B or C. In college, I spent a year doing remedial math before I took calculus, and did very well. But I would not deny student the chance of taking higher math ahead of the bulk of their peers.
Well this is very interesting. On the same day Christopher Krebs, who was the
country’s top cybersecurity official during the presidential election (before
being fired), testified before the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental
Affairs Committee about no election interference,… according to CBS News
Catherine Herridge the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, is
now saying there WAS foreign interference in the 2020 election. WATCH:
Amanda Schoch, ODNI Director of Strategic Communications: "This afternoon
the DNI was notified by career intelligence officials that the
Intelligence Community will not meet the December 18 deadline, set by
Executive Order and Congress..." (1/3)
Breitbart, Deep State Pushes to Deep-Six Intelligence Report Demonstrating Chinese
Interference in 2020 Election. Clearly a fight is going on within the intelligence community over how
seriously to report certain foreign activities. Did the the Russian support
Trump, and the Chinese support Biden with overt actions? Probably. Did the
Iranian muck around as much as they could get away with? Almost certainly. No
doubt the Democrat leaners in the community, who seem to constitute a
majority, or at least a powerful minority will push the idea that the Russian
efforts were concrete, while the Chinese efforts were not, and will claim the
Ratcliffe is pushing the China angle to deflect from Russian help to Trump
(and as well deserved revenge for the treatment of Trump by Brennan and
Clapper, who engineered the report for the 2016 election to push the Russia
collusion hoax. Anyway, this one bears watching carefully, given recent
developments (both the hacking of US systems, allegedly by the Russians, and
the payment between the Dominion software company from China.
Election fraud is the secret “assassin’s mace” of the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) that has long
confounded security hawks, according to tech billionaire and entrepreneur
Patrick Byrne, who back in August assembled a cyber intelligence team to
analyze the U.S. voting system.
“For 10 years or more, there have
been references to a coming ‘assassin’s mace’ in the Chinese literature—where
they take out the United States with one stroke,” Byrne told The Epoch Times’
“American Thought Leaders” program. “The national security community in the
United States has been trying to figure this out: Is it their new aircraft
carrier? Is that the hypersonic missile? Is it this, that, is it an EMP?”
“I
don’t think so, ” he told host Jan Jekielek. “The one stroke that takes the
United States out is what we’re experiencing right now.” The 2020 vote
involved “massive
election fraud,” he
says. “Not voter fraud, but election fraud.”
. . .
He says his team of online security experts now believes Chinese developers
are “under the hood” of the software that has infiltrated at least two of the
main voting systems in the United States.
.@SenRonJohnson: "You lied repeatedly in the press that I was spreading Russian
disinformation...I told you to stop..."@SenGaryPeters: "This is not about airing your grievances. I don't know what rabbit hole
you're running down..."
If you’re smart enough to
understand all the statistical stuff in this lengthy report, perhaps you can explain it in the comments. Quickly skimming it, I
understood that what they are saying is that, compared to expected results —
based on previous elections, voter demographics, etc. — the reported results
are significantly anomalous in five states that Joe Biden allegedly won.
“[T]he model’s predictions match the reported results in all other states,
i.e. states where no fraud has been alleged, but predicts Trump won majorities
in five disputed states (AZ, GA, NV, PA and WI) and 49.68% of the vote in the
sixth (MI).”
I am, and I have enough statistical background to be skeptical of such simple
statistical models. It was an unprecedented election, and in unprecedented
circumstances, unlikely things actually occur (they occur all the time too,
that's why they're unlikely, not impossible). That said, I think they cheated
like hell in Philly, Detroit, Atlanta and Minneapolis, to name a few of the
most important places.
Wild video clip here.@RitaHartIA
says she’s having
@SpeakerPelosi
decide the election result instead of Iowa courts because “there was only
one way they could get the result they needed”
This is as
antithetical to democracy as it gets
#Ia02
• The Democrats stole the election fair and square. Of course I don’t mean
that literally; what I mean is that the election was effectively stolen months
ago before any ballots were cast when legislatures (and sometimes governors
and state courts such Pennsylvania) changed the voting rules to allow expanded
mail-in voting, and the cascade of related vulnerabilities that followed.
Republican legislatures that went along with these COVID-induced panic changes
were foolish if not derelict in their duty. And the Trump campaign was
negligent in not fighting against this months ago. President Trump was correct
to warn about this outcome. Why wasn’t his campaign better organized to resist
this months ago? (I know they did file a few lawsuits, a few of which had some
effect, but it wasn’t enough.) I suspect the long-rumored campaign infighting
and attention to other things distracted Trump’s senior campaign managers from
paying sufficient attention to this.
• Fraud is very easy in our
election system. Remember that our elections are run by part-timers, amateurs,
and volunteers on the county level in America—and we have over 3,000 counties.
In such a diffuse system it is easy to conjure up a few dozen votes here, a
few hundred votes there. Or worse. It is at once a glory of self-government in
America that we actually conduct our elections in this decentralized way
involving tens of thousands of citizen volunteers. It is also astounding that
we use such a vulnerable and chaotic system to choose our president.
•
So the problem with vote fraud is that a remedy is difficult to apply. There
aren’t good remedies. If a race is within a few hundred votes or less, a
recount or ballot challenges can work to reverse the outcome, though not
often. The plain fact is that once a fraudulent ballot is inside the ballot
box and counted, it is very hard to get it back out of the box and un-counted.
Fraudulent ballots need to be intercepted before they reach the ballot box. It
is likely not possible to disqualify enough ballots to change the outcome in
three states, which is what Trump would need. The statistical anomalies of
this election are good circumstantial evidence of vote fraud, but exactly
which ballots, or which vote totals, do you change, and how?
No
court is going to overturn an election result on circumstantial evidence and
affidavits of incorrect polling place procedure alone. (I reserve judgment for
the time being about the Dominion computer system question.) And the thorough
fact-finding necessary for judicial intervention would take time that we
haven’t got. This is why both the Constitution and most state election
statutes make the legislatures the arbiters of presidential election results.
I went through all of the AZ data again... Millions of records to isolate my
top 3899 voter files that I believe will reveal
#PhantomSleeperVoters
I sent off the files and
@LizHarrisMBA
has her army of volunteers to see how many people simply don't exist. 20-30%
of them??
"Dominion voting systems, the company that made the machines Antrim County
uses, also responded to the report, claiming that the 'audit' was actually
part of a 'continuing malicious and widespread disinformation campaign'
against Dominion as a company as well as other voting machine
manufacturers."
The leftist spin in the
Politico article
is purposeful in reference to their alignment with the Democrats; however,
the substantive content of
the article
is accurate. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and his Decepticon
henchmen (Thune, Blunt and Barasso), warn the republicans not to object
during the January 6th certification the electors.
If
a republican senator objects to the election certification, a roll-call vote
within the chamber will be required and McConnell doesn’t want the optic of
Republican senators voting to affirm Joe Biden as the president-elect.
McConnell fears the sunlight.
It is calculated using a series of factors in a (not particularly scientific) mathematical formula.
The factors are: the weather, debt level (specifically, the difference between debt and our ability to pay), the amount of time since Christmas, time since failing our New Year's resolutions, low motivational levels and the feeling of a need to take charge of the situation.
A professor at the University of Exeter claims in a new textbook that learning mathematics can cause “collateral damage” to society by training students in "ethics-free thought." “The Ethics of Mathematics: Is Mathematics Harmful” was written by University of Exeter Professor Paul Ernest, and published as a chapter in a 2018 textbook he edited called The Philosophy of Mathematics Education Today.
. . .
First, Ernest asserts that “the nature of pure of mathematics itself leads to styles of thinking that can be damaging when applied beyond mathematics to social and human issues,” since math facilitates “detached” and “calculative” reasoning. “Reasoning without meanings provides a training in ethics-free thought,” he writes, fretting that this “masculine” paradigm “valorises rules, abstraction, objectification, impersonality, unfeelingness, dispassionate reason, and analysis.”
Second, he argues that the “applications of mathematics in society can be deleterious to our humanity unless very carefully monitored and checked,” worrying particularly about how math facilitates transactions of money and finance.
“Money and thus mathematics is the tool for the distribution of wealth,” he states. “It can therefore be argued that as the key underpinning conceptual tool mathematics is implicated in the global disparities in wealth.”
Finally, Ernest worries of the personal impact math has on “less-successful students,” especially women, since math is often perceived as a “masculine” and “difficult” subject. “One of the persistent myths of the twentieth century has been that females are ‘naturally’ less well equipped mathematically than males,” Ernest claims, albeit without acknowledging data that would complicate his theory. “So two of the detrimental effects of images of mathematics that I shall foreground here are first the negative impact on female students following on from the masculine image of mathematics. Second, the negative impact of mathematics related experiences and images on the attitudes and self-esteem of a minority, including many girls and women,” he writes.
Clearly the University of Exeter needs to reduce his salary to £1 annually, since math is evil. Some things are so stupid it takes PhD to believe them.
Students at the Oberlin High School in Oberlin, La., caused an uproar when they spread rumors about a boy who had joked about a square root symbol looking like a gun. A joke quickly became a tall tale that claimed this boy had planned to attack the school with guns and bombs. The Allen Parish Sheriff's Office responded to a call from KPLC, saying they had received an anonymous tip claiming there was going to be a major shooting involving the jokester.
A discussion among students at Oberlin High School in Oberlin, La., about a mathematical symbol led to a police investigation and a search of one of the student’s homes, according to the Allen Parish Sheriff’s Office.
Assault symbol
On the afternoon of Feb. 20, detectives investigated a report of terroristic threats at the school, where they learned that a student had been completing a math problem that required drawing the square-root sign. Students in the group began commenting that the symbol, which represents a number that when multiplied by itself equals another number, looked like a gun. After several students made comments along those lines, another student said something the sheriff’s office said could have sounded like a threat out of context. Police searched the student’s home, where they found no guns or any evidence that he had any access to guns. Authorities also wrote there was no evidence the student had any intent to commit harm.
Except that's not what Allen Parish Sheriff Doug Hebert told PJM.
"The whole notion that there was a SWAT raid over a math symbol is absurd," Hebert told PJM. "I got a call from a KPLC that they had a serious threat of a shooting at the school, so we went to the house to verify. There was no search warrant, we just sent two [deputies] to knock on the door," chuckled Hebert. "This is a small parish and everybody knows everybody and we found out very quickly there was no crime and no threat."
In spite of that declaration, the student is facing expulsion. In the wake of the shooting in Florida the school board set a new policy. According to KATC, "Any student accused of talking about guns or school shootings will be investigated by three entities: the school board, the sheriff's department, and the district attorney's office."
The chancellor of California’s community college system said he wants to abolish the college algebra requirement and called it a “civil rights issue” in a Wednesday interview.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of California Community Colleges, made the argument while speaking with NPR. He pegged algebraas overly burdensome due to the disproportionate rate at which it prevents students from graduating from community colleges; nearly 50 percent of community college students do not complete their math requirement.
“This is a civil rights issue, but this is also something that plagues all Americans — particularly low-income Americans,” said Oakley. “If you think about all the underemployed or unemployed Americans in this country who cannot connect to a job in this economy — which is unforgiving of those students who don’t have a credential — the biggest barrier for them is this algebra requirement. It’s what has kept them from achieving a credential.”
SJWs don't need math. It just messes up their theories anyway.
A faculty committee has proposed adding a three credit hours requirement in diversity to the general education curriculum at Wayne State University. It also recommended that WSU drop its university-wide requirement in mathematics, an idea that was carried out on June 13.
“We are proposing the creation of specific ‘Diversity’ courses, with students required to take one course in this designation,” said a document from the General Education Reform Committee, which is recalibrating what the university will expect from all students who earn a degree from the state university. It released the proposal in May.
The committee report said, “These courses will provide opportunities for students to explore diversity at the domestic level and consider the ways in which it intersects with real world challenges at the local, national and/or global level.”
In announcing the change in mathematics, the university said, "This decision was made largely because the current (math) requirement is at a level already required by most high school mathematics curriculum."
And we all know that high school students fulfill all their graduation requirements. Well, social scientists don't need math anyway.
John Urschel, an offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens, recently co-authored a paper in the Journal of Computational Mathematics. It is titled "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians" and apparently includes "a cascadic multigrid algorithm for fast computation of the Fiedler vector of a graph Laplacian, namely, the eigenvector corresponding to the second smallest eigenvalue." I understand close to none of the words in that sentence, which comes from the paper's abstract. I probably never will. The rest of the study is similarly accessible. See some highlights below:
I thought that was obvious. . .
Urschel, who was drafted in 2014 to block for Joe Flacco, had a 4.0 grade point average at Penn State and has been published in several mathematical journals. He is also an accomplished chess player. For a living, he uses his body as a bulldozer. His family, he says, wonders why he would spend his time in such a way. The answer is, apparently, that he just enjoys leveling people.
Cecil Rhodes set forth in his will four standards by which prospective Rhodes scholars should be judged: (1) literary and scholastic attainments; (2) energy to use one's talents to the full, as exemplified by fondness for and success in sports; (3) devotion to duty, sympathy for and protection of the weak, kindliness, and unselfishness; and (4) moral force of character and instincts to lead and to take an interest in one's fellow beings. In short, scholars are chosen for being more than bookworms; the selection committees are looking for intellectual talents combined with concern for others.
I don't know how rigorously enforced that aspect is these days, though.
