Percentile Quotes

All subjects are the same. I memorize notes for a test, spew it, ace it, then forget it. What makes this scary for the future of our country is that I'm in the tip-top percentile on every standardized test. I'm a model student with a very crappy attitude about learning.

Okay, so maybe they aren't the greatest generation by anyone's standard, but they are surely the best of the bottom third percentile of their own somewhat muddled and suspect generation.

If I could create something that is even minutely close to a small percentile of a genius as Cloud Atlas, I shall deem my life worthy!

A remarkably consistent finding, starting with elementary school students, is that males are better at math than females. While the difference is minor when it comes to considering average scores, there is a huge difference when it comes to math stars at the upper extreme of the distribution. For example, in 1983, for every girl scoring in the highest percentile in the math SAT, there were 11 boys. Why the difference? There have always been suggestions that testosterone is central. During development, testosterone fuels the growth of a brain region involved in mathematical thinking and giving adults testosterone enhances their math skills. Oh, okay, it's biological. But consider a paper published in science in 2008. The authors examined the relationship between math scores and sexual equality in 40 countries based on economic, educational and political indices of gender equality. The worst was Turkey, United States was middling, and naturally, the Scandinavians were tops. Low and behold, the more gender equal the country, the less of a discrepancy in math scores. By the time you get to the Scandinavian countries it's statistically insignificant. And by the time you examine the most gender equal country on earth at the time, Iceland, girls are better at math than boys. Footnote, note that the other reliable sex difference in cognition, namely better reading performance by girls than by boys doesn't disappear in more gender equal societies. It gets bigger. In other words, culture matters. We carry it with us wherever we go.

It’s YOUR job to get into the top percentile of men they DO like, not cry about it.

I call it Dewey’s rule, and it stands for the idea that parents should try to arrange things so that, on average, their children end up in the 30th percentile of stuff.

It’s very hard to have a productive dialogue with a thirteen-year-old boy, as every gently broached subject becomes an Ultimate Conversation, requiring defense systems and counterattacks to attacks that were never launched. What begins as an innocent observation about his habit of leaving things in the pockets of dirty clothes ends with Sam blaming his parents for his twenty-eighth-percentile height, which makes him want to commit suicide on YouTube.

This study found that someone of below-average VO2 max for their age and sex (that is, between the 25th and 50th percentiles) is at double the risk of all-cause mortality compared to someone in the top quartile (75th to 97.6th percentiles). Thus, poor cardiorespiratory fitness carries a greater relative risk of death than smoking.

TO: ALL TEACHERS FROM: JAMES J. MCHABE, ADM. ASST. PLEASE PLOT AND HAND IN THE MEDIAN PERCENTILE CURVE BASED ON THE MIDTERM MARKS IN EACH OF YOUR CLASSES. IF A CLASS CURVE FALLS BELOW THE PERCENTILE OF FAILURES ALLOTTED TO IT, THE EFFICACY OF THE TEACHER MUST BE QUESTIONED. TEACHERS WITH THE HIGHEST NUMBER OF PASSING STUDENTS ARE TO BE COMMENDED. JJ McH

You have to bang your head against a bigger and stronger wall to realize that you are not the strongest in the world!!!

Hipótesis: comparado con múltiples tipos y modelos de muebles, el regazo de Adam Carlsen se situará en el percentil quinto superior en cuento a comodidad, confort y disfrute

When compared with multiple types and models of furniture, Adam Carlsen’s lap will be rated in the top fifth percentile for comfort, coziness, and enjoyment.

The gains are startling: three points every ten years. To put that in perspective, if an adult who scored average today were compared to adults a century ago, she would be in the 98th percentile.

Key concept," said the Fat Man, "to think that you're doing a shitty job. If you resign yourself to doing a shitty job, you go ahead and get the job done, and since we're all in the ninety-ninth percentile of interns, at one of the best ternships in the world, what you do turns out to be a terrific job, a superlative job. Don't forget that four out of every ten interns in America can't speak English.

Sorry, Dave, the chances of you dying before you get a chance to say Happy Valentine’s Day are in the ninetieth percentile, so we’re going to fuck up the time you have left by filling you full of poison.

People rate themselves more favorably on amorphous traits like sensitivity and idealism (at the 73rd percentile, on average) than on relatively straightforward traits like thriftiness and being well-read (48th percentile).

of the 1 percent saw a bit less than a doubling of real incomes. Those in the 90th through 99th percentiles simply stayed even, with incomes growing at the same rate as per capita GDP, or gross domestic product. And the bottom 90 percent lost relative ground, with their incomes since 1980 growing more slowly than per capita GDP. The result is that the top 1 percent now owns twice as great a share of national wealth as the entire bottom 90 percent. We went from being a world leader in opportunity to being a laggard.

His research demonstrates that one extra day per week of parent-child read-aloud sessions during the first ten years of a child’s life increases standardized test scores by half a standard deviation. That’s as many as 15–30 percentile points—a tremendous gain.3

I can't believe he's going to make me give him the speech. I am livid that he's going to make me give him the speech. I do it, piecing it together from times I've seen it done on TV and in movies. I tell him that there are many people who love him and would be crushed if he were to kill himself, while wondering, distantly, if that is the truth. I tell him that he has so much potential, that he has so many things to do, while most of me believes that he will never put his body and brain to much use at all. I tell him that we all have dark periods, while becoming ever more angry at him, the theatrics, the self-pity, all this, when he has everything. He has a complete sort of freedom, with no parents and no dependents, with money and no immediate threats of pain or calamity. He is the 99.9th percentile, as I am. He has no real obligations, can go anywhere at any moment, sleep anywhere, move at will, and still he is wasting everyone's time with this. But I hold that back--I will save that for later--and instead say nothing but the most rapturous and positive things. And though I do not believe much of it, he does. I make myself sick saying it all, everything so obvious, the reasons to live not at all explainable in a few minutes on the edge of a psychiatric ward bed, but still he is roused, making me wonder even more about him, why a fudge-laden pep talk can convince him to live, why he insists on bringing us both down here, to this pedestrian level, how he cannot see how silly we both look, and when, exactly, it was that his head got so soft, when I lost track of him, how it is that I know and care about such a soft and pliant person, where was it again that I parked my car.

A second way in which desirability discrepancies create mating conflict centers not on men’s misperceptions but rather on the hard, cruel fact mentioned earlier—men view many women as “above threshold” in attractiveness, but women tend to be attracted primarily to men in the top twentieth percentile.

...raising the average income tax for the top income percentile to 43.5 percent from 22.4 percent, the level of 2007, would raise revenue by 3 percent of GDP, which is enough to close the US structural deficit while still leaving very high earners with more after-tax income than they would have had under Nixon.

And more to the point, I have no idea what I want to do. It shouldn't be a surprise. I've had years to think about it. That and just the other day I was pestering Wolf about what he wanted to do--talk about the pot calling the kettle black. But that's just it, I guess. I've never had to think about it. I have very diligently kept all of my options open. The AP classes, the killer GPA, the SAT scores in the 99th percentile, the varsity letters from swim team, the debate club, the fundraising... I've taken on everything and succeeded at it. There is not one weak spot that can be pointed to in my resume, not a single thing that would make an administrator say, "Yes, but what about her..." Except maybe this. Except the part where it's suddenly clear to me why I've been struggling so much with my college essays, with articulating who I am in so few words. How can a person even know who they are if they don't know what they want?

Upper-body mass is approximately 75%3 greater in men because women’s lean body mass tends to be less concentrated in their upper body,4 and, as a result, men’s upper body strength is on average between 40-60%5 higher than women’s (compared to lower-body strength which is on average only 25% higher in men6). Women also have on average a 41% lower grip strength than men,7 and this is not a sex difference that changes with age: the typical seventy-year-old man has a stronger handgrip than the average twenty-five-year-old woman.8 It’s also not a sex difference that can be significantly trained away: a study which compared ‘highly trained female athletes’ to men who were ‘untrained or not specifically trained’ found that their grip strength ‘rarely’ surpassed the fiftieth percentile of male subjects.9 Overall, 90% of the women (this time including untrained women) in the study had a weaker grip than 95% of their male counterparts.

Page 85: Results for the military stand apart from all civilian work settings and occupations. One relevant factor for explaining the military’s success is presumably that each branch has its own minimum score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test required of all recruits. The Army requires a score at the 31st percentile or higher, equivalent to an IQ of 92.6 or more, which is roughly the top half of the African and Latin distributions.

0.8-standard-deviation increase in the average sprinting ability in West Africans would be expected to lead to a hundredfold enrichment in the proportion of people above the 99.9999999th percentile point in Europeans. But an alternative explanation that would predict the same magnitude of effect is that there is simply more variation in sprinting ability in people of West African ancestry—with more people of both very high and very low abilities.

Eventually... for me by the time you're 25 or so, you just start running out of shit to do. Books to read... people to meet. I was too chicken to be an "entrepreneur" in college and I wish that back then someone told me... stressed to me, that if you score above a certain percentile on the SAT.... you just won't be running into too many people... who have the credibility to tell you what to do. And they say I can't Drink anymore, either. So now... what?

The principal of Bennett-Kew Elementary School in Inglewood, California, whose student body is 52 percent Hispanic and 45 percent black, raised these children’s reading levels from the third percentile to the fiftieth percentile in just four years. But she was threatened with loss of money because she used phonics instead of the mandated “whole-language” teaching methods and taught exclusively in English, instead of using the “bilingual” approach required by education authorities. The fact that she was succeeding where others were failing carried no weight with state education officials.

The night before a biochemistry class, I read the last year's lecture notes. I look at the pictures in the book. Now, I've got the general concept. Sure...There's a couple of details to fill in and a a few things to memorize. But that's no big deal. I've got the big picture, and that's all I need. Bring it on professor, I'm ready. That's right. The next day, I'm a goalie sitting in the front row. "Nothin gets past me." My ability to comprehend a biochemistry lecture just went from 30% to 95%. I went on to score 780 out of a possible 800 on the medical school boards exam in biochemistry. Given that the 99th percentile began around 690, this was one of the highest scores in the USA, perhaps the highest.

The question has been raised, General Ia, as to whether or not you already know the outcome of this tribunal. Do you?” he asked her. “Is that why you’re trying to avoid being here? To avoid being bored?” “Sirs, I deal in percentages. There are eight possible outcomes to this tribunal which are greater than one percent in their probability, and fifty-two possible outcomes that are less than one percent, most being less than one-tenth of one percent. However small those minor possibilities are, I cannot rule them out as an outcome. I was shot in the shoulder with a handheld laser cannon on a less than three percent probability, which most people would consider to be a highly unlikely outcome. I was also elevated to the rank of a four-star General, never mind that I am now a five-star, on a less than one-hundred-thousandth of a percent, when the largest percentile, forty-seven percent, was that I should have been elevated only to the rank of Rear Admiral. “As for being bored . . . I actually would prefer to be here because that means nobody would be attacking our colonies. But they are, and that means my preferences must take second place to my sense of duty. I will admit I have sat through this tribunal around eight or nine times in the timestreams, examining those eight largest percentiles,” Ia added candidly. “This has left me very familiar with the majority of all evidence the prosecution will be presenting against me . . . but again, the outcome is never one hundred percent certain, until it has actually come to pass. I do take this tribunal seriously, but I also take the ongoing threat to Terran civilians equally seriously, sirs.

Moving was one thing that helped me understand what our environment does to us. Another was becoming a foster parent. Our foster kids were born in a county that borders Clemson, where we lived. Their county is in the ninth percentile for upward income mobility—it’s a very poor area with few jobs and fewer opportunities. Due to the legalities surrounding foster children, I cannot go into much detail about their early environment, but suffice it to say their home situation was far from ideal. The chances for these bright, intelligent, loving children to improve their lot in life, as well as their opportunities for happiness and fulfillment, if they had remained in their native environment were practically zero percent. But as Dr. Raj Chetty and Dr. Nathaniel Hendren stated, “The data shows we can do something about upward mobility…Every extra year of childhood spent in a better neighborhood seems to matter.

A second case concerns Charles Whitman, the 1966 “Texas Tower” sniper who, after killing his wife and mother, opened fire atop a tower at the University of Texas in Austin, killing sixteen and wounding thirty-two, one of the first school massacres. Whitman was literally an Eagle Scout and childhood choirboy, a happily married engineering major with an IQ in the 99th percentile. In the prior year he had seen doctors, complaining of severe headaches and violent impulses (e.g., to shoot people from the campus tower). He left notes by the bodies of his wife and his mother, proclaiming love and puzzlement at his actions: “I cannot rationaly [sic] pinpoint any specific reason for [killing her],” and “let there be no doubt in your mind that I loved this woman with all my heart.” His suicide note requested an autopsy of his brain, and that any money he had be given to a mental health foundation. The autopsy proved his intuition correct—Whitman had a glioblastoma tumor pressing on his amygdala.

We would also expect the more masculine-looking person to have higher levels of autism traits. High functioning autism (or Asperger’s) is characterised by a very strong ability to systematize (create and work out systems) but a very weak ability to empathise. Autistics are socially unskilled, obsessed with detail, and have little interest in other people. These characteristics are associated with high testosterone. Autistics are subject to elevated fetal steroidogenic activity, including elevated levels of testosterone, as evidenced by tests of their amniotic fluid (Baron-Cohen et al., 2015). Dawson and colleagues (2007) have shown that autism is associated with a distinct intelligence profile. Autistics score strongly on the Ravens test (which strongly tests systematizing) relative to scores on broader IQ tests, which include vocabulary tests, for example. They score on average 30 percentile points higher, and in some cases 70 percentile points higher, on the Ravens than they score on the Wechsler, which is a broader test. So,

The subprime market tapped a segment of the American public that did not typically have anything to do with Wall Street: the tranche between the fifth and the twenty-ninth percentile in their credit ratings. That is, the lenders were making loans to people who were less creditworthy than 71 percent of the population. Which of these poor Americans were likely to jump which way with their finances? How much did their home prices need to fall for their loans to blow up? Which mortgage originators were the most corrupt? Which Wall Street firms were creating the most dishonest mortgage bonds? What kind of people, in which parts of the country, exhibited the highest degree of financial irresponsibility? The default rate in Georgia was five times higher than that in Florida, even though the two states had the same unemployment rate. Why? Indiana had a 25 percent default rate; California, only 5 percent, even though Californians were, on the face of it, far less fiscally responsible. Why? Vinny and Danny flew down to Miami, where they wandered around empty neighborhoods built with subprime loans, and saw with their own eyes how bad things were. “They’d

A remarkably consistent finding, starting with elementary school students, is that males are better at math than females. While the difference is minor when it comes to considering average scores, there is a huge difference when it comes to math stars at the upper extreme of the distribution. For example, in 1983, for every girl scoring in the highest percentile on the math SAT, there were eleven boys. Why the difference? There have always been suggestions that testosterone is central. During development, testosterone fuels the growth of a brain region involved in mathematical thinking, and giving adults testosterone enhances some math skills. Oh, okay, it’s biological. But consider a paper published in Science in 2008.1 The authors examined the relationship between math scores and sexual equality in forty countries (based on economic, educational, and political indices of gender equality; the worst was Turkey, the United States was middling, and, naturally, the Scandinavians were tops). Lo and behold, the more gender equal the country, the less of a discrepancy in math scores. By the time you get to the Scandinavian countries, it’s statistically insignificant. And by the time you examine the most gender-equal country on earth at the time, Iceland, girls are better at math than boys.

The radial patterning of Protestantism allows us to use a county’s proximity to Wittenberg to isolate—in a statistical sense—that part of the variation in Protestantism that we know is due to a county’s proximity to Wittenberg and not to greater literacy or other factors. In a sense, we can think of this as an experiment in which different counties were experimentally assigned different dosages of Protestantism to test for its effects. Distance from Wittenberg allows us to figure out how big that experimental dosage was. Then, we can see if this “assigned” dosage of Protestantism is still associated with greater literacy and more schools. If it is, we can infer from this natural experiment that Protestantism did indeed cause greater literacy.16 The results of this statistical razzle-dazzle are striking. Not only do Prussian counties closer to Wittenberg have higher shares of Protestants, but those additional Protestants are associated with greater literacy and more schools. This indicates that the wave of Protestantism created by the Reformation raised literacy and schooling rates in its wake. Despite Prussia’s having a high average literacy rate in 1871, counties made up entirely of Protestants had literacy rates nearly 20 percentile points higher than those that were all Catholic.18 FIGURE P.2. The percentage of Protestants in Prussian counties in 1871.17 The map highlights some German cities, including the epicenter of the Reformation, Wittenberg, and Mainz, the charter town where Johannes Gutenberg produced his eponymous printing press. These same patterns can be spotted elsewhere in 19th-century Europe—and today—in missionized regions around the globe. In 19th-century Switzerland, other aftershocks of the Reformation have been detected in a battery of cognitive tests given to Swiss army recruits. Young men from all-Protestant districts were not only 11 percentile points more likely to be “high performers” on reading tests compared to those from all-Catholic districts, but this advantage bled over into their scores in math, history, and writing. These relationships hold even when a district’s population density, fertility, and economic complexity are kept constant. As in Prussia, the closer a community was to one of the two epicenters of the Swiss Reformation—Zurich or Geneva—the more Protestants it had in the 19th century. Notably, proximity to other Swiss cities, such as Bern and Basel, doesn’t reveal this relationship. As is the case in Prussia, this setup allows us to finger Protestantism as driving the spread of greater literacy as well as the smaller improvements in writing and math abilities.

Men view many women as "above threshold" in attractiveness, but women tend to be attracted primarily to men in the top twentieth percentile. This gives women the upper hand in the sexual marketplace.

A person who smokes has a 40 percent greater risk of all-cause mortality (that is, risk of dying at any moment) than someone who does not smoke, representing a hazard ratio or (HR) of 1.40. This study found that someone of below-average VO2 max for their age and sex (that is, between the 25th and 50th percentiles) is at double the risk of all-cause mortality compared to someone in the top quartile (75th to 97.6th percentiles). Thus, poor cardiorespiratory fitness carries a greater relative risk of death than smoking. That’s only the beginning. Someone in the bottom quartile of VO2 max for their age group (i.e., the least fit 25 percent) is nearly four times likelier to die than someone in the top quartile—and five times likelier to die than a person with elite-level (top 2.3 percent) VO2 max. That’s stunning. These benefits are not limited to the very fittest people either; even just climbing from the bottom 25 percent into the 25th to 50th percentile (e.g., least fit to below average) means you have cut your risk of death nearly in half, according to this study.

INTRODUCTION 0 to 3 MONTHS 1. Make the most of your hospital stay 2. Take care of your postpartum body 3. Take baby to the pediatrician . . . several times 4. Take newborn photos 5. Figure out breastfeeding 6. Get some sleep! 7. Manage Mom and Dad 8. Celebrate baby’s first milestones 9. Survive baby witching hour 10. Watch out for the blues 11. Get back in the sack 12. Get out of the house 13. Think about babywearing 3 to 6 MONTHS 14. Find your village 15. Prepare to go back to work, or not 16. Start some routines 17. Tame teething 18. Think about sleep training, or not 19. Teach baby sign language 20. Create a photo book 21. Reconnect with your partner 22. Don’t obsess over percentiles 23. Survive baby’s first illness 24. Make “me time” a priority 25. Interview sitters 26. Ready, Set, Eat: Start solid foods 6 to 9 MONTHS 27. Time to babyproof 28. Deal with separation anxiety 29. Work on those motor skills 30. Get back to your workouts 31. Plan a getaway 32. Start brushing teeth 33. Make mom friends 34. Start traditions 9 to 12 MONTHS 35. Get an adjustment 36. Ask for help 37. Think about discipline 38. Think about weaning, or not 39. Sign up for a mommy-and-me (or daddy-and-me) class 40. Take care of your diet 41. Capture your memories 42. Reignite your style 43. Embrace your new body 44. Trust your instincts 45. Book a couple’s getaway 46. Get your affairs in order 47. Do a cake smash photo shoot 48. Find a hobby 49. Learn to save money 50. Celebrate baby’s first birthday

Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn’t a ticket to big income gains. But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that’s not a misprint.

Recently, two economists—Kelly Bedard and Elizabeth Dhuey—looked at the relationship between scores on what is called the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS (math and science tests given every four years to children in many countries around the world), and month of birth. They found that among fourth graders, the oldest children scored somewhere between four and twelve percentile points better than the youngest children. That, as Dhuey explains, is a “huge effect.” It means that if you take two intellectually equivalent fourth graders with birthdays at opposite ends of the cutoff date, the older student could score in the eightieth percentile, while the younger one could score in the sixty-eighth percentile.

That is what indices are like, of course. Not the fan-shaped spread of rice bursting from a gunnysack. Not the thunder roll of barrels of turpentine cascading down a plank. And not a seventeen-year-old girl with a tree-shaped scar on her knee—and a name. History is percentiles, the thoughts of great men, and the description of eras. Does the girl know that the reason that she died in the sea or in a twenty-foot slop pit on a ship named Jesus is because that was her era?

I also think about what to say in the exit interview. I know not everyone gets invited to do one in person, that a lot of employees just get a form to fill out. But I’m in the ninety-eighth fucking percentile. I’ve worked across five different organizations and had a hand in hiring many hundreds of people. Plus I’m a woman in leadership, that population Amazon keeps saying it’s trying to grow. Of course I’ll get a real exit interview, right?

Though school administrators often defend their tracking practices as fair and objective, there usually is a recognizable racial pattern to how children are assigned, which often represents the system of advantage operating in the schools.13 For example, in a study of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina, Roslyn Mickelson compared the placements of Black and White high school students who had similar scores on a national standardized achievement test they took in the sixth grade. More than half of the White students who scored in the ninetieth to ninety-ninth percentile on the test were enrolled in high school Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) English, while only 20 percent of the Black students who also scored in the ninetieth to ninety-ninth percentile were enrolled in these more-rigorous courses. Meanwhile, 35 percent of White students whose test scores were below the seventieth percentile were taking AP or IB English. Only 9 percent of Black students who scored below the seventieth percentile had access to the more-advanced curriculum.

The most shocking observation is that the median markup, the markup of the firm exactly in the middle of the distribution, has remained unchanged. This tells us that for at least half of the firms, there has been no rise in markups at all! Yet, at the same time, markups for a few firms have grown outlandishly. The ninetieth percentile of the markup distribution—those firms with the highest markups—has grown from 1.5 in 1980 to a whopping 2.5 in 2016. Ten percent of the firms now sell their goods 250 percent above cost!

Average wealth per adult (not household) within the wealthiest 10 percent of the population was about $2.8 million in 2019. Move down one decile and average wealth plummets to about $555,000—then $293,600, then $152,000. If you ranked in the twenty-fourth wealth percentile that year, you had $199 to your name—about enough to buy one of the cheaper propane grills at Home Depot. This is how depraved things have become in a republic whose founding document asserted that all people (okay, all white male landowners) were created equal.

Reducing response times at very high percentiles is difficult because they are easily affected by random events outside of your control, and the benefits are diminishing.

student loans finally paid off, my own apartment in the most prestigious city in the world, a full closet and a fuller passport, high SAT scores. Any way you sliced it, I was good. Top percentile of human beings, you could say, in terms of success.

I’m so tired,” he says. “Me too,” I say, perhaps too quickly. “We’re all tired.” He brings his knees to his chest. “No, I’m really tired,” he says. He rolls onto his side, his back to me. He wants to be encouraged. I put my hand on his shoulder. I can’t believe he’s going to make me give him the speech. I am livid that he’s going to make me give him the speech. I do it, piecing it together from times I’ve seen it done on TV and in movies. I tell him that there are many people who love him and would be crushed if he were to kill himself, while wondering, distantly, if that is the truth. I tell him that he has so much potential, that he has so many things to do, while most of me believes that he will never put his body and brain to much use at all. I tell him that we all have dark periods, while becoming ever more angry at him, the theatrics, the self-pity, all this, when he has everything. He has a complete sort of freedom, with no parents and no dependents, with money and no immediate threats of pain or calamity. He is the 99.9th percentile, as I am. He has no real obligations, can go anywhere at any moment, sleep anywhere, move at will, and still he is wasting everyone’s time with this. But I hold that back—I will save that for later—and instead say nothing but the most rapturous and positive things. And though I do not believe much of it, he does. I make myself sick saying it all, everything so obvious, the reasons to live not at all explainable in a few minutes on the edge of a psychiatric ward bed, but still he is roused, making me wonder even more about him, why a fudge-laden pep talk can convince him to live, why he insists on bringing us both down here, to this pedestrian level, how he cannot see how silly we both look, and when, exactly, it was that his head got so soft, when I lost track of him, how it is that I know and care about such a soft and pliant person, where was it again that I parked my car.

Colombia parece ser uno de los países más desigualitarios registrados en la World Top Incomes Database: la participación del percentil superior se situaba en torno a 20% del ingreso nacional durante los años 1990-2010, sin una tendencia clara (véase la gráfica IX.9). Se trata de un nivel de desigualdad aún más elevado que el alcanzado por los Estados Unidos en 2000-2010, por lo menos si se excluyen las plusvalías:

The night before a biochemistry class, I read the lecture notes from last year. I look at the pictures in the book. I read some of the book. Now, I've got the general concept. Sure...There's a couple of details to fill in and a few things to memorize. but that's no big deal. I've got the big picture and that's all I need. Bring it on professor. I'm ready. That's right. The next day, I'm a goalie sitting in the front row. Nothin gets past me... My ability to comprehend a biochemistry lecture just went up from 30% to 95%. I went on to score 780 out of a possible 800 on the medical school biochemistry boards exam (USMLE 1). Given that the 99th percentile began around 690, this was one of the highest scores in the USA, perhaps the highest.

Ten percent of productivity comes from the top percentile and 26% of output derives from the top 5% of workers.

Reformers have argued loudly and aggressively that our schools and students are failing. But the language they use is by necessity obscure and technocratic, because no matter how emphatically they argue that America’s students are falling behind their international counterparts, the data repeatedly show that when studies control for the effects of poverty, American students are competitive with the top percentile of students in the world. And a 2011 Stanford University study found that family income continues to be far and away the biggest determining factor of student achievement. Make your way through the jargon about achievement gaps and teacher accountability, and the problem becomes clear. Nearly a quarter of all children in the US live in poverty, among the highest rates in the developed world. Combine this with the fact that in America, poor students receive less educational funding than rich ones and you have a real civil rights issue: the U.S. government discriminates against poor children.

At Google, we front-load our people investment. This means the majority of our time and money spent on people is invested in attracting, assessing, and cultivating new hires. We spend more than twice as much on recruiting, as a percentage of our people budget, as an average company. If we are better able to select people up front, that means we have less work to do with them once they are hired. The worst case with a 90th percentile candidate is that they have an average year. They are unlikely to become the worst performer in the company. An average candidate, however, will not only consume massive training resources, but is also just as likely to end up performing well below average as above average.

Sample Target Total Cash Compensation Policy: Set the TTCC for each job at the 60th percentile of market practices as presented in the annual industry survey. Payouts for poor performers will be equal to the 25th percentile of pay; top performers will earn payouts equal to or greater than the 90th percentile of labor market rates.

Betebenner said the system, known as Student Growth Percentile, was designed to measure student gains or losses, not to assign blame or credit for them. “Simply focusing on teachers as being the only potential cause of growth of students is pretty obviously myopic,” said Betebenner. The data would be more useful, he said, as a starting point for discussions with teachers on the reasons individual students are improving or losing ground, which could include many factors in and out of school.

Increased morbidity and mortality may be associated with a macrosomic infant or a large for gestational age (LGA) fetus. This is defined as a fetus with an estimated fetal weight at or beyond the 90th percentile at any gestational age. At term, approximately 10% of newborn infants weigh more than 4000 g, and the weight of 1.5% of newborns is in excess of 4500 g. Excessive

The TCap Continuum is simply a percentile scale from 1 to 100, which represents the comprehensive range of capabilities for a population of threat agents.

Though school administrators often defend their tracking practices as fair and objective, there usually is a recognizable racial pattern to how children are assigned, which often represents the system of advantage operating in the schools.13 For example, in a study of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina, Roslyn Mickelson compared the placements of Black and White high school students who had similar scores on a national standardized achievement test they took in the sixth grade. More than half of the White students who scored in the ninetieth to ninety-ninth percentile on the test were enrolled in high school Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) English, while only 20 percent of the Black students who also scored in the ninetieth to ninety-ninth percentile were enrolled in these more-rigorous courses. Meanwhile, 35 percent of White students whose test scores were below the seventieth percentile were taking AP or IB English. Only 9 percent of Black students who scored below the seventieth percentile had access to the more-advanced curriculum.14

Crash-test dummies were first introduced in the 1950s and for decades they were based around the 50th-percentile male. Today, the most commonly used dummy is 1.77 m (5 ft 10 in) tall and weighs 76 kg (168 lb), significantly taller and heavier than an average woman. The dummy also has male muscle-mass proportions and a male spinal column. As a result, female drivers are endangered in so many aspects. Men are more likely than women to be involved in a car crash, which means they dominate the numbers of those seriously injured in them. However, when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured and 71% more likely to be moderately injured, even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seatbelt usage, and crash intensity. She is also 17% more likely to die.

Although black and Latino/a students are less likely to be represented among students achieving above the 75th percentile on each test than are white and Asian students, some black and Latino/a students do score at or above that level. Focusing on the group average obscures a deeper, important reality: any black, white, Asian, or Latino/a student standing in front of us might have any level of achievement. This observation may seem trivial; we all know that achievement varies. But this fact is momentous because it means that, regardless of the average level of achievement for students of a given racial group, knowing the race of a specific child offers no information whatsoever about that child’s current or potential achievement.

Amazon describes response time requirements for internal services in terms of the 99.9th percentile, even though it only affects 1 in 1,000 requests. This is because the customers with the slowest requests are often those who have the most data on their accounts because they have made many purchases — that is, they’re the most valuable customers

THE SCORE IS NOT ME Like every picture of ours conveys a different emotion and message; the exam scores we get are but just one picture of our ability. The score is not me.

Even someone of moderate fitness (40th to 60th percentile) is still at more than double the risk of all-cause mortality than the fittest group, this study found.

This table expresses all-cause mortality risk for different fitness levels compared to individuals in the top 2% of VO2 max for their age and sex (“extreme fitness”) [TOP] and for various comorbidities—that is, people with versus without each illness. [BOTTOM] Fitness groups are divided by percentile: Least (<20th percentile); Low (21st to 40th percentile); Moderate (41st to 60th percentile); Fit (61st to 80th percentile); High (81st to 97th percentile).

Cruel randomness [...] Besides, if God really was selecting people to protect on the basis of some bigger picture, then you would not expect the number of people who are killed in various ways to be subject to the rules of probability. However, I can predict with remarkable accuracy the road toll each year, the number of people who will be struck by lightning, the number of people who will be killed by shark attacks, and so on. Each of these causes of death has a certain rate of occurrence that is quite predictable. It is not just the number of deaths that is predictable, it is the whole probability distribution of deaths that is predictable. If you know the average number of deaths by car accidents in a city, then it is possible to calculate all the percentiles for that city. For example, you can estimate the numbers of deaths that would be exceeded only once every ten years. When you do this for many cities, you find that the 1-in-10-year extremes are exceeded in approximately 10% of cities each year. This is exactly what you would expect if the world was random, but not what you would expect if anyone was in control. Car accidents, diseases, and industrial accidents all follow the same probability distribution, known as the “Poisson distribution”. The Poisson probability distribution is based on the assumption that accidents happen randomly. It is simply not possible for tragedies to appear to follow the Poisson probability distribution while actually being controlled by God. Any interventions of God that interfere in the random processes would be detectable. If they are not detectable, then they are random and God is not involved. If we accept that the world is random, and that bad things happen to everyone by chance, where does that leave God? Either he does not exist, or he has no power, or he does not care. Whichever of those answers you prefer, God does not deserve our thanks.

Tch, look at this shameless ssagaji behavior,” Madame Jung spits in disbelief, packing away her stones. “This is why of all the things I do for ShinBi, marketing idols is my least favorite task. I have to convince the public that you kids are special, deserving of worship and adoration … when in reality, idols—and the trainees who desperately want to be idols—are the losers of this country. Bottom of the barrel, like my youngest son—I had to pull strings just to get him a junior-level job at this company. Most idols are just empty-headed losers who never had hope of scoring in the top percentile on the national university entrance exam.

Intersex is the natural phenomenon known to the medical profession for centuries but necessarily obscure to everyone else. It is the fact that a small percentile of human beings are born either with ambiguous genitalia or turn out to have other biological attributes (for instance an unusually large clitoris, or an unusually small penis) which suggest that they may lie somewhere between the sexes.

The church elders were not happy about it, but they allowed her to go to New Orleans, on the condition that she return to Junction City afterward and marry the young man they’d approved for her. Now twenty-two years old, with a husband she did not want, she found herself in a strange and sinful city competing with medical students who had undergraduate degrees from places like Harvard and Stanford. She finished the first semester at the top of her class. Her new husband complained to the church elders that his wife was spending all her time working. “He told me I was being disobedient by working so hard,” recalled Charity. “And they agreed with him. They told me I should be at the fiftieth percentile of my class. No better.” After the next semester, when her grades remained high, the church elders sent her a letter instructing her to drop out of medical school and return to Junction City.

RM, who had made the top percentile in his national mock exams.

These benefits are not limited to the very fittest people either; even just climbing from the bottom 25 percent into the 25th to 50th percentile (e.g., least fit to below average) means you have cut your risk of death nearly in half, according to this study.

If you’re down to the last applicant, of course, you are necessarily forced to choose her. But when looking at the next-to-last applicant, the question becomes: is she above the 50th percentile? If yes, then hire her; if not, it’s worth rolling the dice on the last applicant instead, since her odds of being above the 50th percentile are 50/50 by definition. Likewise, you should choose the third-to-last applicant if she’s above the 69th percentile, the fourth-to-last applicant if she’s above the 78th, and so on, being more choosy the more applicants are left. No matter what, never hire someone who’s below average unless you’re totally out of options.

Race norming is the practice of converting individual test scores to percentile or standard scores within one’s racial group. In the process of race norming, an individual’s percentile score is not calculated in reference to all persons who took the test; instead, an individual’s percentile score is determined only in reference to others in the same racial group. After norming scores by percentile in separate racial groups, the lists are combined to make selection decisions. By norming within racial groups, the same raw score for Whites and Blacks can be converted to different percentile scores based on the distribution of scores for each racial group. For example, suppose that a White candidate and a Black candidate each earn a raw score of 74 points on a test. If the White candidate’s test score is converted to a percentile only in reference to other White candidates and the Black candidate’s test score is converted to a percentile only in reference to other Black candidates, then the percentile scores earned by the two candidates may not be equal even though they attained the same raw test score. Perhaps the 74-point raw score for the White candidate may be at the 60th percentile of the White distribution of scores, whereas the 74-point score for the Black candidate may be at the 65th percentile of the Black distribution of scores. When the White and Black percentile scores are combined into a common list and selection decisions are made, the candidates who scored the same 74 raw points on the test might be treated very differently. For example, if the organization decides to hire only persons who scored at the 65th percentile and above, then the Black candidate would be selected and the White candidate would not. In another circumstance, the organization could decide to hire persons with the highest percentile first, which would mean that the Black candidate would be selected prior to the White candidate.

We can instead use the Threshold Rule, where we immediately accept an applicant if she is above a certain percentile. We don’t need to look at an initial group of candidates to set this threshold—but we do, however, need to be keenly aware of how much looking remains available.

Wikipedia: Race Norming Race-norming, more formally called within-group score conversion and score adjustment strategy, is the practice of adjusting test scores to account for the race or ethnicity of the test-taker. In the United States, it was first implemented by the Federal Government in 1981 with little publicity, and was subsequently outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1991. Prior to being banned by the federal government, race-norming was practiced by 38 U.S. states' employment services. The aim of this practice is to counteract alleged racial bias in aptitude tests administered to job applicants, as well as in neuropsychological tests. The practice converted and compared the raw score of the test according to racial groups. The score of a black candidate is only compared to the scores of those who had the same ethnicity. If the candidate's score, which is reported within a percentile range, fell within a certain percentile when compared to white or all candidates, it would be much higher among other black candidates.

Gold digging is more likely to succeed than a quest for love. If you’re evaluating your partners based on any kind of objective criterion—say, their income percentile—then you’ve got a lot more information at your disposal than if you’re after a nebulous emotional response (“love”) that might require both experience and comparison to calibrate.

So we’re left with two paths to assembling phenomenal talent. You can find a way to hire the very best, or you can hire average performers and try to turn them into the best. Put bluntly, which of the following situations would you rather be in? We hire 90th percentile performers, who start doing great work right away. We hire average performers, and through our training programs hope eventually to turn them into 90th percentile performers. Doesn’t seem like a hard choice when it’s put that way, especially once you realize there’s probably enough money in your budget to get these exceptional people—it’s just being spent in the wrong places. Companies continue to invest substantially more in training than in hiring, according to the Corporate Executive Board.74 Per employee Training spend: $606.36 Hiring spend: $456.44 % of total HR expense Training spend: 18.3% Hiring spend: 13.6% % of revenue Training spend: 0.18% Hiring spend: 0.15% Companies spent more on training current employees than on hiring new employees. Data from 2012.

If we are better able to select people up front, that means we have less work to do with them once they are hired. The worst case with a 90th percentile candidate is that they have an average year. They are unlikely to become the worst performer in the company. An average candidate, however, will not only consume massive training resources, but is also just as likely to end up performing well below average as above average.

Even if we did nothing to make the voucher program more cost-effective, we still could afford to offer this crucial benefit to all low-income families in America. In 2013, the Bipartisan Policy Center estimated that expanding housing vouchers to all renting families below the 30th percentile in median income for their area would require an additional $22.5 billion, increasing total spending on housing assistance to around $60 billion. The figure is likely much less, as the estimate does not account for potential savings the expanded program would bring in the form of preventing homelessness, reducing health-care costs, and curbing other costly consequences of the affordable-housing crisis.56 It is not a small figure, but it is well within our capacity.

One question that often gets a telling response is, “If given the chance, would you hire this person again?” Another is, “Of the people you have managed or worked with, in what percentile would you place this candidate?

Vaugh-Arek (Warchief) Male Orc, Age 29 Magical affinity: Runes Magical power: 89th Percentile Magical energy: 55th Percentile Physical power: 82nd Percentile Karma: -3,843 C-Rank Adventurer Guild: None

The gap between the programmers in the top 75th percentile and those in the bottom 25th percentile can be as much as 27 times along some dimensions of programming quality.

I employ AI without hesitation when it enhances my ability to perform. Our HUD system has long provided targeting overlays that have served me and my soldiers well. I would gladly consider AI tactical assessments when forming a battle plan, and I believe an LT using an AI in their decision-making can be helpful, provided they don’t do what the MOCOM AI system attempted to do with me—force on-the-fly adjustments based on minute percentiles even in the face of a successful tactic.

In summary, when measuring performance, it’s worth using percentiles rather than averages. The main advantage of the mean is that it’s easy to calculate, but percentiles are much more meaningful.

Bayesian x% credible interval that extends from the to the percentile of the posterior distribution. For the posterior distribution in Figure 1.1, a 95% Bayesian credible interval for extends from 0.59 to 0.98. In contrast to the orthodox confidence interval, this means that one can be 95% confident that the true value of lies in between 0.59 and 0.98.

Much of the cultural divide over abortion grafts readily, but not perfectly, onto tensions over class. Of a large survey of pro-life and pro-choice activists, 94 percent of pro-choice women worked outside of the home, and half of them enjoyed incomes that placed them in the top 10 percent of all working women in the nation. Many were in the most affluent percentiles in the country. In contrast, 63 percent of pro-life advocates did not work outside of the home (and those that did were unmarried). The personal income of pro-life women activists was very low, if there was any at all. The story was similar in terms of education and occupation. Where pro-choice women tended to be well-educated professionals, pro-life activists tended to be housewives or in traditional female occupations. For working-class families, “ family values” was not a political slogan but a belief in sacrifice, fate, belonging, character, and the sanctity of parenthood.

Few people would dream of hiring a contractor to build them a house and expect it to be built to a safe standard only 85 percent of the time; similarly, few people would want to eat out in a restaurant where only 85 percent of the meals were safe to eat. Why then do we accept such sloppiness in road safety, where a situation in which 85 percent of drivers going the speed limit is deemed to be good enough?

In other words, computer-assisted instruction is likely to result in a 12 percentile point gain in achievement when it replaces the instruction of the teacher, but this gain is likely to rise to 17 percentile points when the technology is used as a supplement to the teacher’s instruction.

From parent to teenager, I love you is not I love you the way our interactions leave me feeling useful and appreciated and like I am definitely in the top percentile of parents working today. It's Even though I delivered you at permanent expense to my genitals and you rolled your eyes at me when I tried to hit the dab, and you trapped me in that modern-day torture chamber of club music and olfactory assault, Abercrankie and Filth, then later that day, impatient to be taken to Bridget's house, you beeped at me from the passenger's seat in the driveway, like maybe I worked for you, I love you.

Inequality did increase as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Between 1780 and 1830 output per labourer in the UK grew over 25 per cent but wages rose barely 5 per cent. The proportion of national income going to the top percentile of the population rose from 25 per cent in 1801 to 35 per cent in 1848. In Paris in 1820, around 9 per cent of the population were classified as ‘proprietors and rentiers’ (living from their investments) and owned 41 per cent of recorded wealth. By 1911 their share had risen to 52 per cent. In Prussia, the share of income going to the top 5 per cent rose from 21 per cent in 1854 to 27 per cent in 1896 and to 43 per cent in 1913.29 Industrial societies, it seems clear, grew more unequal over the course of the nineteenth century.

In 2013, one of the Cardinals’ rival scouting departments commissioned a study that examined draft outcomes more deeply still. The study, which extended back to 1990, found that if a club’s draft produces nine players who appear in the majors for even a single game, it ranks in the 95th percentile. The 95th percentile for number of everyday players—defined as those who go on to accumulate 1,500 big league plate appearances or batters faced—is four. The 95th percentile for number of firmly above-average players—that is, those who produce a cumulative Wins Above Replacement above 6.0 in their six cost-controlled, pre–free agency seasons—is three.

There is no secret to being, as Linnus says, in that “first percentile,” that minority of young couples who stay together for life. It’s as simple, and as complicated, as keeping that look in your eyes.

What if age and obesity really are the two biggest predictors of super spreading? Does that mean that in the middle of a pandemic, passengers will refuse to sit next to overweight people? On a plane, what if the answer is viscous saliva and someone comes up with a 10 second test to measure if someone is in the 99th percentile? Would a restaurant or a movie theater or a church be justified in asking everyone at the door to take a saliva test and then turn away those whose results fall at the extreme end?

Reliability means making systems work correctly, even when faults occur. Faults can be in hardware (typically random and uncorrelated), software (bugs are typically systematic and hard to deal with), and humans (who inevitably make mistakes from time to time). Fault-tolerance techniques can hide certain types of faults from the end user. Scalability means having strategies for keeping performance good, even when load increases. In order to discuss scalability, we first need ways of describing load and performance quantitatively. We briefly looked at Twitter’s home timelines as an example of describing load, and response time percentiles as a way of measuring performance. In a scalable system, you can add processing capacity in order to remain reliable under high load. Maintainability has many facets, but in essence it’s about making life better for the engineering and operations teams who need to work with the system. Good abstractions can help reduce complexity and make the system easier to modify and adapt for new use cases. Good operability means having good visibility into the system’s health, and having effective ways of managing it. There is unfortunately no easy fix for making applications reliable, scalable, or maintainable. However, there are certain patterns and techniques that keep reappearing in different kinds of applications. In the next few chapters we will take a look at some examples of data systems and analyze how they work toward those goals.

The most striking (and frustrating) thing about all of this is that researchers have found that certification requirements have virtually no correlation with performance in the classroom whatsoever. The best evidence on this point (which is consistent with all other evidence that I’ve seen) comes from Los Angeles. When California passed a law in the late 1990s to reduce class size across the state, Los Angeles had to hire a huge number of new teachers, many of whom were uncertified. Los Angeles also collected classroom-level data on the performance of students assigned to any given teacher. A study done for the Hamilton Project, a public policy think tank, looked at the performance of 150,000 students over three years and came to two conclusions: (1) Good teachers matter. Students assigned to the best quarter of teachers ended up 10 percentile points ahead of students given the worst quarter of teachers (controlling for the students’ initial level of achievement); and (2) certification doesn’t matter. The study “found no statistically significant achievement differences between students assigned to certified teachers and students assigned to uncertified teachers.” The authors of the study recommend that states eliminate entry barriers that keep talented people from becoming public schoolteachers.6 Most states are doing the opposite.

ChatGPT (GPT-4) struggles with essays. It scored in the 99th percentile on the verbal section of the GRE and only in the 54th percentile on the writing portion. It scored in lower percentiles on AP English Literature and AP English Language. It knows vocabulary, but not craft.