I recently finished Malcolm Gladwell's newest book, Outliers, the Story of Success. The book describes what makes people successful, and includes observations about the importance of age in the success equation. Outliers has caused me to question whether schools get different results not only due to differences in students, but also in differences in the age of students in the same grade, particularly in the lower grades. This has tremendous implications not only for sports, as described in Outliers, but also for things like the GT selection process and standardized testing.
Malcolm Gladwell is going to be in Houston next week, and, as a preview, you can watch this video of his talk at the 92nd Street Y in New York on January 6, 2009.
Outliers definitely gets you thinking about what it takes to be a success. It also got our CTO questioning some of the stats in the book. He used our online database to crunch some numbers related to the Jan/Feb hockey trend identified by Gladwell. Check it out as it may lead you to dig a little deeper and question some trends in the book.
http://www.trackvia.com/blog/2009/01/27/poking-holes-in-outliers/
Posted by: EDunigan | Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at 10:22 PM