Ok, new in town, got apartment, car, job.  What next?  Local library card, of course.  So today I went to the downtown branch of the Palo Alto City Library, a short walk away from me on Hamilton St., and did my usual “mystery shopper” routine of wandering in, pretending to know nothing, and asking about services and how to get a card.  (have done this in a swathe of cities..).

Palo Alto Downtown Library

The Palo Alto Downtown Library, as it’s usually known, is a delightful facility.  It opened in 1971, designed by William Busse, and was renovated and rededicated in 2011.  Originally, it featured the wrought-iron gates saved from the city’s original, 1905, Carnegie-funded public library that sat across the street, where the 1960s high-rise City Hall now stands.  According to Palo Alto Patch, the Carnegie building gates “proved too heavy and awkward for patrons, so they were removed.”  Ok, I understand, it may not have been so user- or kid- or elderly- or handicapped-friendly, but I kind of wish I could have the gravitas and historical experience of pulling open those doors when I went.

The present building I would describe as a subtle and effective melding of influences including Asian, Mission, and Californian Modern.  An East Asian aspect is suggested by the flowering trees and the enclosed garden spaces between the outer walls and the building proper, which have a meditative and considered quality in themselves, and also lend serenity to the glass-walled library interior spaces facing onto them.  The plastered and curved exterior sheltering wall suggests Mission, while the prominent horizontal wooden beams and the entraceway trellis speak more of California modern.

photo by Kathy S., Palo Alto, on Yelp.com

The comparatively blank outer walls at street line, curving in to the recessed and shaded entrace, to me articulate a sophisticated type of welcome to the visitor — receptive but not overt, the demeanor of the sort of person I would like to meet.  Considering buildings from the standpoint of how they talk to the street, I really like the Downtown Library’s refined manners.

Palo Alto Post Office

This weekend I stopped in to the downtown Palo Alto post office, which is a lovely Mission / Spanish Revival building from the 1920s.   (see note on history below).

I had the idea of requesting a PO Box there, as it would be useful to have this as an address and it would be enjoyable to stop in to this building regularly.  However, I have learned that the USPS has just announced plans to sell the building and relocate this year.  The article notes that a nearby 4-story building recently sold for “an astounding $64 million, or $900 per square foot.”

The New York Times recently had a fascinating story about Deutsch Post, a now ultra-efficient and thriving global competitor born out of the former German post office (Deutsch Bundespost):  “Reinventing Post Offices in a Digital World.” DP and its bright-yellow identity is known to Americans via its global package-delivery arm, DHL.

Deutsche Post has sold off all but 2-3 off the once 29,000+ buildings it owned, and usually operates inside other business such as banks or groceries, or in some villages, out of the homes of franchisees.

Deutsche Post branch/store, and kiosk, Berlin

The contrast with the hidebound, collapsing US Postal Service is obvious.  Clearly, something like what Deutsche Post has done is, economically, the way to go, to maintain the USPS;  but the case of the Palo Alto landmark which I won’t in future get to visit regularly — with all the sense of civic uplift it might help inculcate — shows what may be lost when public buildings are sold off.  All over the country, civic landmarks are being and will be sold off, many never to be stepped foot in by the public again.

History / architecture note

The Palo Alto post office was designed by a significant local architect, Birge M. Clark, whose father Arthur Clark was also an architect, Stanford Professor and mayor of Mayfield (Mayfield is the town that was absorbed into Palo Alto in the 1920s, whose old main street and train stop are the California Ave and Caltrain stop of today, near Hotel California).

A longtime friend of Herbert Hoover, Arthur Clark constructed the future U.S. president’s home in 1919 with assistance from young Birge.

my 2010 VW Jetta. Also known as “Jettaround,” on the car-sharing service Getaround.

I have to say, going to California, Silicon Valley, new job, all important; but buying a first car: pivotal.

Although, a lot of cars seem to me quite competently designed but undistinguished, or only subtly so. Older Jettas had a more distinct, angular style, but current ones like my grey 2010 Jetta S are quite similar to a swathe of other models from Detroit, Japan, even to many more expensive cars like Benzes and those often-tame Japanese luxury sedans.

On the other hand, for me, as an honorary Brit and expert introvert, avoiding distinction and statement is a key criteria. Self-expression via my car? That, for me, veers perilously close to arriviste, even gauche.

Volkwagen was originally called the KdF-Wagen” (German: Kraft durch Freude – “strength through joy”)

Therefore, subtle elements like brand penumbra, history, personal association, and detailing matter a lot. This is why, for all that this depends on great engineers, marketers are in the drivers seat. In the developed world now, cars are so ubiquitous, so generally well-engineered and based on extremely mature core technologies — are so functionally equivalent for most people — that, I think, most money over $10,000 that anyone spends on a new car is almost purely to be won by marketing and identity.  Subtle and repressed identity, perhaps masked by practical sentiments (“we need it for the kids”… “safety and reliability are key features to me”…) but identity nonetheless.

If you also consider the evidence showing that most people buy cars soon after deciding to enter the market, with very little research, then you realize that cars, while being high engineering at base, are in fact mainly a huge and lucrative field of identity expression. In fact, the more the brand talks about engineering (BMW, e.g.), the more it’s likely to be about identity.

Taking me, for example, let’s take a tour of that fertile field the marketers, not the engineers, have to plough. My father once owned a Model A Ford, which along with the Model T was the American “people’s car” designed to be affordable to all workers. This was precisely the same goal of the (*cough* Nazi) German Labour Front, starting in 1937, for what was originally called the KdF-Wagen” (German: Kraft durch Freude – “strength through joy” — the name of the giant state-controlled leisure organization in Nazi Germany) and then Volkswagen, “people’s car” (a term used in Germany as far back as the 1920s).

When the VW operation was about to be dismantled after WWII under the “pastoralization” policy, pre-Marshall Plan, VW was saved by an enterprising British Army overseer who arranged to start selling VW trucks to the occupying forces and the German postal service. Some returning UK soldiers were allowed to bring their VW Beetles back to England after the war, thus seeding the market.

BMW 2002 (produced 1968-76), dark green like our one

My father subsequently owned a Beetle, and my parents a VW hatchback, and further on the German front, in England I grew up riding around in our BMW 2002.  (a practical and best-selling car, now considered one of the most classic and collectible of all BMWs).

All this no doubt is part of why I tend to like German cars. For a design and book devotee like me, Germany is also importantly the homeland of Gutenberg, the Bauhaus and Modern design/typography, and the Frankfurt Book Fair. So too, I’m pleased to learn — as an aspiring trans-Atlantic type, and dual U.S. / E.U. citizen — that the name “Jetta” comes from the German term for the Atlantic jet stream, as in the “winds of freedom blow” (Martin Luther’s Die Luft der Freiheit weht, Stanford’s motto) between Europe and America.

It can’t hurt, either, that Volkswagen group also includes Audi, Porsche, and Lamborghini, some of my favorite other marqees. (if I were the type to reach, as the British say condemningly, I might even say that I think of my Jetta as really an entry-level Audi. In sheep’s clothing — or more sheepish clothing, as the case may be).  Bearing in mind that in my new environs of Silicon Valley, a nearly-new Jetta (which I think of as fabulous, unimaginable and nearly embarrassing luxury, any moment to be found out, confiscated, and me thrown back in jail) — here counts as practically a junker, a just-out-of-college throwaway car, or something you drive to impress upon your investors that you’re truly a bare bones, “skin-in-the-game” startup type. A 2010 Jetta is far cheaper than the average car on the road here, as my insurance agent told me, with a sympathetic and perhaps pitying nod, while selling me collision insurance.

The Volkswagen campaign for my sentiments really took off in the 1950s, however, when VW began its extraordinary run of game-changing, highly effective counter-cultural U.S. marketing,  with the print campaigns designed by Doyle Dane Burnbach.

The 1959 Think Small series of advertisements, a famous example of which is at left, were revolutionary for their compelling graphic modesty, counter-intuitive message, and sometimes leaving off brand, logo, and product description entirely. It was voted the No. 1 campaign of all time in Advertising Age‘s 1999 The Century of Advertising.^[3

Apple “Think different” ads

Never mind that a 2010 Jetta is hardly small by world standards, and if you look at it in the context of the whole VW range you see it’s a “family sedan”, far up the list above the smaller-footprint categories of City Car, Super Mini, Mini, small sedan, etc.  Volkswagen reached out to those uncomfortable with “Big” America, chafing at that Whitman-esque “barbaric yawp” and raw power, and invited us in to the Think clubhouse. (connecting to the original IBM “Think” slogan dating from the 1910s, but even more importantly, to Apple’s later “Think different,” which derived from “Think small” all the way down to the lower-case capitalization of “different”). VW was a pre-Steve Jobs version of Apple.

VW “VDub” parody ad, 2006 – click to play

A more recent example of counter-cultural marketing by Volkswagen that totally worked for me is their VDub advertising campaign from 2006, three TV ads parodying MTV’s auto show Pimp My Ride, such as Episode 1, “Wrecking Ball.”  Each stars an effete German engineer named Wolfgang, and German model Zonja Wöstendiek as his assistant Miss Helga, who mock the hip-hop wannabees’ absurdly vain hot-rods, and gleefully destroy them, to introduce a gleaming and trim VW GTI.  Awesome!  Those pimp-my-ride jerks who used to push us around on the playground, now we get to destroy their wide-boy blaring-exhaust tail-finned customized abominations! (those which Tom Wolfe satirized in his landmark 1963 Esquire “New Journalism” essay, “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmm)…”, title essay of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby).

But counter-cultural politics aside, the true ace-in-the-hole and deal-clincher for the 2010 Jetta, its Unique Selling Proposition (thank you, friends in Marketing) is, for sure, the hubcap typography.

VW was already way out ahead with its general logo, which cleverly stacks the V and W into a the type of old-style center-crossed “W” beloved to typography buffs everywhere, and joins the power of a circle to dynamic zagging diagonals. (Benz, the trinity? Lexus?  yawn..). Note the center-crossed “W” in the icon of one of our most potent New Economy symbols, Wikipedia:

2010 Jetta hubcaps (right): win for best typography

Now notice the play of “V”s and “W”s contained in the hubcap specific to (as far as I’ve seen) the 2010 Jetta, at left. Genius. Natural. Totally unnnoted by most people, but also highly distinctive when you finally see it. (like me! I’m just kidding. That’s just what what most people feel).

In sum, I may be a shameless capitalist tool and a pawn of advertising masterminds. But, so far as I could see, in the brief time I had to research my purchase, there were a dozen manufacturers out there in a fiercely competitive market, making quite well-designed, quite similar cars at a similar price, similar fuel economy and safety rating etc, using highly mature technologies. Time is short, research is hard, they all seem satisfactory. What am I going to do? I’m going to enjoy myself by swimming in the fertile sea of emotional / cultural associations around cars, because that’s what I’m really buying, not a car itself — that’s the real value in it for me. I’m going make some little statement, subtle — but for me all-important — about the Model A Ford that was my father’s first car, and the value I place on, say, good typography.

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Addendum (1/15/12 9pm):
My father observes that, not only did I ride around in that BMW 2002 when growing up, but I worked hard and lovingly to maintain it, as shown in this picture he sent, from circa 1979.

My two sisters, on the other hand, the soul of indifference as seen in background skipping rope or something, now drive a Subaru and a Toyota. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

The point is, parents, you have a solemn responsibility: instill good brand preferences in your children by age five, or it could be game over.

Thanks pops.  Super Dad and, clearly, German auto industry brand ambassador #1.

Comments?  email tim (at) tjm.org, or Twitter @mccormicktim.  Due to spam problems, comments entered below will be delayed for approval.

Cambridge, naturally

“What Is College For?” Notre Dame philosophy professor Gary Gutting recently asked, in the NYT.  Answer:  basically, it’s for ideas.

Gutting’s article was interesting to me as perhaps one of the purest examples of “Ivory Tower” thinking I’ve ever seen.  Interesting, perhaps disturbing, and finally unconvincing.

His evidence for the value of college to students is… self-reported student findings that, e.g., college was “very useful in helping them grow intellectually.” Of course, almost anything that a person might do between the ages of 18 and 22 could be useful in helping them grow intellectually — talk to anyone who’s travelled abroad, gone to work in their uncle’s business, or done national service —  and it’s hardly surprising that after years of being told that this is the purpose of their family’s huge investment, students tend to report back the observation.

His thesis is that “the raison d’être of a college is to nourish a world of intellectual culture; that is, a world of ideas, dedicated to what we can know scientifically, understand humanistically, or express artistically.”

Well, that’s interesting.  According to whom, or what?  He cites no previous thinker, no historical evidence, no particular cognizance of the history of education even.  Then, he makes the amazing claim that “this world [of intellectual culture]  “is mainly populated by members of college faculties: scientists, humanists, social scientists…and those who study the fine arts.” This is so fact-free as to be hardly worth rebutting.  What about the majority of scientists, who work for governments, pure research institutes, in health/medicine, or in industry?  Or the entire media world, which is primarily non-academic?  Technology, a radical transformative force in matters intellectual and otherwise, and mostly a non-academic phenonomen, is likewise written off.

Even accepting Gutting’s claim, you wouldn’t know from his remarks that there is a vigorous and useful debate going on about how you might detect and measure this “intellectual culture” impact of academia.  Does Gutting think that the citizens and governments of the world are going to keep forking over trillions just on the strength of an airy claim?  I’d hope not, and I’d hope that he’d hope not, if he believes in critical inquiry.

In the UK, the Higher Education Funding Council’s proposed 2009 Research Excellence Framework (REF) sparked extensive debate about impact of research, a useful compendium of which debate is gathered at “The Danger of Assessing Research by Economic Impact” by Prof. Leslie Ann Goldberg of Univ. Liverpool, Computer Science.

In the US, a narrower but lively debate has recently attended the work of Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and affiliate of the DC-based Center for College Affordability and Productivity.  Based on analysis of research activity in four mid-ranked US English departments, he argues that humanities “research” consumes a large portion of department resources while producing hardly any measurable impact, e.g. in citations of the research work.  See “The Research Bust”, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec 4, 2011.

Personally, I think the crucial larger story there is the increasingly threatened and shifting alliance between STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) and non-STEM disciplines.  While we still hear the ideal, exemplified by Gutting’s article, of the unified truth-seeking academy, in practice the pact has been crumbling for decades.  It is fairly obvious that the research system of the STEM disciplines works differently than that of the humanities, being based on (or aspiring to, at least) distinct principles of falsifiable hypotheses and reproducible results, with clear pathways to technological application of discoveries.  (or at least, aspires to these principles: see “Scientists’ Elusive Goal: Reproducing Study Results.” Wall Street Journal, Dec 2, 2011, on recent interesting results on widespread non-reproducibility).

The social sciences partake of this scientific/technical framework to a degree, and also have their distinct own realm of engagement in studying/shaping social policy;  professional study such as law has, of course, its own self-evident rationale.

activity map of "humanities computing" from DigitalHumanities.org

That leaves the humanities, uneasily adrift between the truth metrics and justifications more solidly occupied by other disciplines.  (with the upstart “digital humanities” energetically embracing science/technology methods, but not necessarily harbored with solid metrics or  justifications.  Also, often eschewing affiliation with the traditional humanities disciplines, as shown in this chart of the “extra-academic professions,” or what DH leading light Bethany Nowviskie @nowviskie of the University of Virginia calls “alt-academics”).

Yet, this complicated landscape is either outside or beneath the notice of Gutting’s “What is College For?”, which doesn’t present an argument, really.  I would hardly even call it an ideal, because an ideal would be philosophically consistent and encompassing, rather than being parochially tied to a particular institution such as contemporary higher-ed.  No, I would say Gutting’s view, at least as expressed in this article, is closer to mere ideology:  that is, a set of beliefs constructed (consciously or not) by a group in order to promote and self-explain its socio-economic position.  That’s fine, as far as it goes, but I don’t think it very effectively describes or defends higher education, or much exemplifies either philosophy or intellectual culture.

I look at the “fact checking” movement and recent partisan / political disputes over it, and suggest a need to go beyond principles of objectivity, and to embrace political strategy, learning theory, and empirical evidence about how to have impact.  As recently commented by political organizer Biko Biker, the first rule of effectiveness is:  meet people where they are.

It’s been a not-so-quiet few weeks in Lake Wobegon — the world of journalistic fact-checking, that is: the practice of examining news stories, politicians’ statements, etc., for factual accuracy.  It’s familiar to many from the syndicated newspaper columns of Politifact, launched in 2007 (their Web site shown at left).  It’s also done by other organizations such as AIM and FAIR, and TV news programs, and is joined by many related Web projects such as Hypothes.is, a proposed “peer review layer for the Internet,” and “Truth Goggles” from Dan Schultz at MIT.

The other week a major shot across the bow was fired by conservative magazine The Weekly Standard‘s with its cover story,  “Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact Checking’: The liberal media’s latest attempt to control the discourse” by Mark Hemingway.  The title sums it up quite well, but basically Hemingway reviews the rise of fact-checking, rips apart a few choice Politifact and Associated Press fact-check pieces, and observes an overall liberal-Democratic agenda in the enterprise.

Over at NYU School of Journalism, however, wizened sage Jay Rosen had long seen it coming:

Told you to keep an eye on this for 2012. It’s here. The politicized attack on fact checking as–guess what?–politicized jr.ly/927s

— Jay Rosen(@jayrosen_nyu) December 11, 2011

Conversation ensued, around Rosen’s much-followed Twitter feed, including a followup from John McQuaid at Forbes: “How to Fix Fact Checking.” McQuaid argues that the Standard legitimately pointed out some definitely sloppy, biased Politifact and AP fact-checking, but the answer is just to do the job right:

[The Weekly Standard‘s piece] is basically an argument for endless epistemological war….In this scenario, nobody will ever know the “truth” because it cannot meaningfully exist until one side has defeated the other….
“The problem is that fact-checking – like everything – is sometimes a lazy, half-assed business. If fact-checking is as important as it claims, its practitioners need to acknowledge its problems and fix them.”

“Fix the problems,” McQuaid explains, means: “hard-nosed reporting and independent evaluation.”

Along similar lines, my friend Alec Macgillis writing in the The New Republic argues that  “fact-checkers wouldn’t be needed if all of us journalists were more able, willing and empowered to do our jobs: to vet and explain political claims as they were being made.” I can’t help but feel this is essentially nostalgic:  wishing for a day when there was (if there ever was) an ample supply of well-trained, well-resourced, well-respected professional reporters to give every topic its thorough, balanced, due.  Here, I would have to to agree with Clay Shirky’s recent volley in the CJR “future of journalism” fray,  “Institutions, Confidence, and the News Crisis” and say that this just isn’t a choice any more, that such a system is economically and technologically and politically past tense.

Even if there were an economic climate to support such a professional journalistic cadre deployed on every story, I think that today, it wouldn’t even assure success.

Why?  Because man is a political animal, ours is a political world, and journalistic fact-checking must, like it or not, have a political strategy if it is to escape political neutralization.

So I claim.

Madison, Wisconsin, 2011 protests

This does not mean that fact-checking must have a political position. Rather, I think that proponents of fact-checking must recognize that if you want to influence public opinion, you have to prosecute the cause through the mechanisms of public opinion, and this IS fighting the good fight.  Taking refuge in high principles of neutrality and independence may be dignified, but if it’s ineffectual, if you lose the war, it’s cold comfort.  To be fair, fact-checking projects are doing much to increase their appeal and effectiveness, e.g. the humor of Politifact’s “pants on fire!” negative rating, or annual “worst liars” awards. But I’m not sure that many partisan boundaries are yet being crossed.

Do Politifact columns disproportionately critique Republicans?  Perhaps your objective method objectively found greater incidence of falsehoods in Republican speeches, according to rigorous truth goggles software or peer review.  It doesn’t really matter. If prevailing media, and most of the audience, might easily dismiss you by the fact that Politifact gives more lower grades to Republicans, say, then figure out a new angle that will be more effective in the war.  Even patterns of who reads and cites your findings can be used as evidence of bias. [3].  Protesting your objectivity may do nothing to reach the unconverted.

A model for analyzing fact-checking projects — for impact, interaction, and topical foci — was recently shown by John Kelly of Morningside Analytics.  His research, summarized by Ethan Zuckerman, shows that fact-checking sites differ significantly in what communities they reach, and how much they reach into different political territory.  See also his fascinating visualization of the blog network Global Voices Online, with auto-classification of sources by topic focus, dot size to represent traffic volume, and graph of linking patterns between sites.

This is intriguing, but we might go a step further, and investigate how much fact-check information actually affects, or might affect, people’s understanding.  Here we could look to cognitive science and learning theory’s findings/methods regarding how people revise/improve their understandings. These approaches might be entirely counter-intuitive, from the standpoint of traditional journalistic: e.g. might suggest giving less information or fewer source choices; or creating certain types of temporary confusion or dissonance or “meaning threat” (see Psychological Science paper PDF, or summary).  Personally, I have a hunch that the greatest hope for building media that will change minds lies in personalized media, e.g. that would look for deficits in your reading matter / social graph and try to address them.  There is some interesting research showing that many, if not necessarily a majority, of news readers actually express interest in and report higher satisfaction with such “balancing news,” but more on this point in later installments.

.
A play-book for fact-checking

I think it’s virtually impossible to depoliticize political media with pure fact-checking. The treachery of politics and public opinion will relentlessly undermine a too-idealistic enterprise, and merely presenting critiques doesn’t necessarily reach people or change their minds.

So, I’m starting a fact-checking play book. It embraces and extends what Rosen, McQuaid, and other experts have said:

1. Don’t be sloppy, in any way, ever. It’s fatal.
2. Continual self- and process examination. Never trust trust (see note #1 below).
3. Realize that it’s not just about “facts”, it’s also about narratives and mythic/cognitive frames.  One’s framing concepts of “factual” or “truthful” may not be the same as everyone’s.  That doesn’t mean there is no objective reality, just that people understand reality through quite different frames, and you must think about how to communicate through those frames.
4. “Meet people where they are.”
   Fulfilling our own ideals and impressing people who think like us is seductive but insufficient. Perhaps focus might be shifted towards hard evidence of how much we are changing minds and crossing partisan / concept-cluster boundaries.  For example, a) quantitative media analysis such as that cited by John Kelly, or b) cognitive science, learning theory, and personalization.
5. Accept that it’s a political project, even if, ironically, the point is to get “truth” out from under the politics.  Ultimately, we’re not above it, and that’s ok.  That’s our world.

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NOTES

1. I originally titled this post “Reflections on Fact-checking and Depoliticizing Politics”, alluding to a famous 1984 computer science paper, “Reflections on Trusting Trust,” by Ken Thompson.  He demonstrates how even a simple computer program can be almost indetectably hiding a fatal bug, because a truly devious attacker can invisibly embed the bug or attack into the very tools used by the programmer.  See the  Wikipedia summary or the original paper. Ultimately, he suggests, security is a social process, of understanding and assessing the trust-worthiness of every party and tool you interact with, including yourself.

2. Overview of fact-checking.  A history of the practice is under way by Lucas Graves, journalist and PhD student at Columbia.

3. Citation as evidence of bias.
What if some fact-check source is cited more often by liberal/Democratic members of Congress than by conservatives?  Then it might easily be proved to be liberally biased, according to the methodology of the best-known scholar of news bias, UCLA’s Tim Groseclose, as explicated in the leading peer-reviewed journal Quarterly of Economics (PDF).

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Agree?  Missed something? Please send comments, suggestions to me at tim (at) tjm.org, or post on Twitter mentioning @mccormicktim, or comment on Facebook.

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Elite Public High Schoolers, Predominantly Asian-American, sweep Siemens / Westinghouse Prizes

To survey the high schools of the 2011 Siemens Competition in Math, Science, & Technology winners (descendent of the former Westinghouse Science Talent Search) is to see American secondary, public education at its impressive peak.  Polished web sites burst with notices of state champion teams, “Top Schools in Nation” awards from various publications, and arrays of courseware / e-learning tools to shame most universities.  Curriculums are replete with Advanced Placement programs, wide-ranging foreign-language instruction, outstanding student newspapers, radio and TV stations, extensive performing arts programs, etc.  To students in most of the world, including much of the U.S., these places would be almost hard to believe, educational paradises on earth, combining rigorous study, lavish facilities, and seemingly unlimited encouragement of diverse interests and creativity.

Remarkably, of the 16 high schools represented, only 1 is private (Horace Mann, in New York).  However, most are either in highly affluent and educated districts (Palo Alto, Cupertino, Westport CT, John’s Creek GA) or are highly selective (Stuyvescent, LSMSA in Louisiana).  Four schools are in the San Francisco area, four in the NYC area.

Asian-American students predominate, making up 4 of 6 individual winners (1st, 2nd,3rd, 5th) and 9 of 14 team winners.  Exemplifying the trends, the top prize winner, Angela Zhang, attends the 72% Asian Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, California, one of the nation’s most affluent cities (and naturally, home of tech superpower Apple).  A 2005 Wall Street Journal article claimed that Monta Vista was experiencing a “white flight” caused by White American families feeling overwhelmed by the academic focus of the school’s majority Asian American students, notes Wikipedia.

What conclusions might one venture from this small but interesting sample?  One, public education in the U.S. is extraordinary, in places.  You can get outstanding education for your children, without the large private tuitions paid by the elite of most countries, but you’ll probably have to invest greatly to live in one of the elite communities where this “public” good is provided.  Also, cultural factors matter a lot — Asian-American focus on education is dramatically reflected in the makeup of Siemens Competition winners — and proximity to leading cities (SF, NYC, Chicago, Atlanta in this case).

Schools of Individual Winners
#1) Monta Vista High School, Cupertino, California (public, 72% Asian)
#2) Stuyvesant High School, New York, New York (public, selective)
#3) Northview High School, Duluth, Georgia (public, in John’s Creek, Georgia’s wealthiest city, near Atlanta)
#4) Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts, Natchitoches, Louisiana (statewide public, selective, residential)
#5) West High School, Iowa City, Iowa, (public)
#6) Staples High School, Westport, Connecticut (public, 1884)

Schools of Team winners
#1) Oak Ridge High School, Oak Ridge, Tennessee (public; est. 1943 for children of Manhattan Project workers)
#2) Troy High Schoool, Troy, Michigan (public)
#3) Evanston Township High school, Evanston, Illinois (public, 1883)
#4) Oceanside High School, Oceanside, New York (public, Nassau County, Long Island NY)
Horace Mann High School, Bronx, New York (private, 1887;  rated by Forbes as 2nd best prep school in US)
#5) Lowell High School, San Francisco, Californic (public magnet/selective, 1856, ranked 28th best HS by USN&WR)
Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science, Denton, Texas (public, 2-yr, selective, residential)
Westwood High School, Austin, Texas (public, top-10 Texas & top 100 US rated)
#6) Palo Alto Senior High School, Palo Alto, California (public), and
Henry M. Gunn High School, Palo Alto, California (public)