How others see you is incredibly important. Perception is reality goes the truism, whether for a person, a company or a state. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, New Mexico got four or five mentions.
I couldn’t find that fifth mention, a passing reference to the investigations of the state’s investment practices. It might have been a day or two earlier.
Here are the four.
Page A2: A dark New Mexico pops from a map showing results by state for 2010 high school graduates who took the ACT. New Mexico, colored black, is easy to see because Arizona and Texas are white, indicating that too few students too the ACT to allow fair comparison. Our black mark puts us in the group with the worst performance with less than 30% meeting at least three of the four college readiness benchmarks.
Page A5: On a map, New Mexico shows as one of 27 states, the story says, “already provide free contraception and other reproductive-health services to lower earning women who otherwise wouldn’t qualify for services through the Medicaid federal-state insurance program for the poor.”
Page A15: The day’s book review is of “A Grand and Bold Thing,” described as “a breezily informal, close-up account of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey,” which turns out to use, “a dedicated 2.5-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory,” according to the website, www.sdss.org.
The review only said that the telescope was “installed on a promontory overlooking the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.” I checked in order to confirm that the location was in one of the group of observatories in the Sacramento Mountains just south of and largely ignored by Cloudcroft.
Page D1 in the Personal Journal had an article about xeriscaping. Albuquerque appeared in the jump on page D2. We got credit only after attention went to, in this order, Las Vegas, NV; Ambler, Pa.; Austin; Peoria, Az; Cary, N.C; and Denver. The Albuquerque item was two long paragraphs about potential conflict between a coming Bernalillo County pro-xeriscaping ordinance and the Primrose Pointe development which requires “irrigated turf” on half of every front yard.
The article said, “Many xeric principles are simply common sense.” Uh, yeah.
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