Jan 21, 2014
Jan 11, 2014
Demography Links
1. New York Times: Why Are Americans Staying Put?
... “This decline in migration has been going on for a long time now, through all sorts of ups and downs in the housing market,” said Greg Kaplan of Princeton University, who, along with Sam Schulhofer-Wohl of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, has studied the issue in depth. But even with the pressure of high housing costs in many areas, Americans are moving less, Kaplan said. “That might explain why people are moving from San Francisco to, I don’t know, Houston,” he said. “But you’ve seen a decline in migration from Texas to California as well as California to Texas.”
This is not a short-term supply-and-demand issue or a side effect of a slow-growth economy or a shift in demographics. The change is deeper. Kaplan and Schulhofer-Wohl have won applause from other economists for developing a novel theory to explain this creeping inertia: labor markets in the United States have simply become more homogeneous. Earnings have become more similar across the country, meaning there is less incentive to move from one place to another in search of a raise. The country has also become less diverse, work-wise. Pick any two cities, and chances are they offer a more similar mix of jobs than they did 20 or 50 years ago. We have become less a nation of Pittsburghs and more a nation of Provos. ...
... Even so, many economists believe that if Kaplan and Schulhofer-Wohl’s narrative is right, there is reason to suspect that a less-mobile populace might not mean a less-dynamic economy. Workers haven’t stopped moving because housing prices or other financial or social concerns are holding them back. They’ve stopped moving because they just don’t see the need to. “Whether it’s a good thing depends on why,” Kolko said. “If your job prospects don’t depend on having to move someplace else, the decline in mobility might be a good thing.”
2. The Atlantic: Stuck: Why Americans Stopped Moving to the Richest States
... "Americans are moving far less often than in the past, and when they do migrate it is typically no longer from places with low wages to places with higher wages," Tim Noah wrote in Washington Monthly. "Rather, it’s the reverse." Why America lost her wanderlust is not entirely clear—perhaps dual-earner households make long moves less likely; perhaps the Great Recession pinned underwater homeowners on their plots—but those still wandering a ren't going to the right cities. ...
... Americans aren't simply moving to the states with the lowest unemployment (Oregon, Tennessee, and North Carolina all have jobless rates above the national average). More importantly, we aren't moving to states with the best records for low-income families getting ahead. In fact, we're often fleeing the best places for a upwardly mobile middle class. ...
... This doesn't make much sense if you envision American families rushing to the most promising metros. It does make sense if you see American families rushing to the most affordable homes. ...
3. Huffington Post: U.S. Population Grows At Slowest Rate Since The Great Depression
... The U.S. population grew by just 0.72 percent in the year ended July 1, 2013, the Census Bureau reported Monday. That’s the slowest growth rate since 1937. Population growth has hovered at super-low levels for the past few years, according to William Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan research organization. The trend is "troubling," Frey said, and is due largely to the weak economy. ...
4. New Geography: The Geography Of Aging: Why Millennials Are Headed To The Suburbs
One supposed trend, much celebrated in the media, is that younger people are moving back to the city, and plan to stay there for the rest of their lives. Retirees are reportedly following suit. ...
... But a close look at migration data reveals that the reality is much more complex. The millennial “flight” from suburbia has not only been vastly overexaggerated, it fails to deal with what may best be seen as differences in preferences correlated with life stages.
We can tell this because we can follow the first group of millennials who are now entering their 30s, and it turns out that they are beginning, like preceding generations, to move to the suburbs. ...
5. Business Insider: Female Mortality Rates Are One Of The Strangest And Most Disturbing Trends In The United States
Change in female mortality rates from 1992–96 to 2002–06 in US counties
6. Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States
Here you will find one of the greatest historical atlases: Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright's Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, first published in 1932. This digital edition reproduces all of the atlas's nearly 700 maps. Many of these beautiful maps are enhanced here in ways impossible in print, animated to show change over time or made clickable to view the underlying data—remarkable maps produced eight decades ago with the functionality of the twenty-first century.
7. Forbes: What Would The U.S. Be Like If We Had 124 States?
8. NPR: Overweight People In Developing World Outnumber Those In Rich Countries
... "Over the last 30 years, the number of people who are overweight and obese in the developing world has tripled," says , of the Overseas Development Institute in London.
One-third of adults globally are now overweight compared with fewer than 23 percent in 1980, the report . And the number of overweight and obese people in the developing world now far overshadows the number in rich countries. ...
9. Economist: The high rate of suicide in Asia
10. PBS Newshour: Japanese population declined by record number in 2013
The Japanese population, which has been shrinking for the last couple of years, declined by a record 244,000 people in 2013, according to health ministry estimates.
If the current trend persists, the BBC reports the country will lose a third of its population in the next 50 years. ...
11. Real Clear World: Easing China's One-Child Policy Won't Stop Demographic Decline
In an attempt to mitigate a near-certain demographic future of rapid aging, shrinking labor force and critical gender imbalance, the Chinese government has adjusted its one-child policy. The decision demonstrates that, irrespective of a nation's politico-economic system, governments cannot avoid demography's juggernaut consequences. This mid-course correction in population policy will have marginal effect as China is aging at a much faster pace than occurred in other countries. This, along with a shrinking workforce and critical gender imbalance, will increasingly tax the government. ...
(Related: New Geography: China Failing its Families)
12. Business Insider: These Facebook Maps Reveal Migration Trends Around The World
... The maps use two simple data points offered up by its 1 billion users — where you live and your hometown — to draw a map of how groups of people migrate from place to place. The Facebook Science team was looking specifically for “coordinated migration,” when a significant proportion of a population from one city moves collectively to another city. This could be the result of economics, wars, natural disasters or even state policies. ...
13. Atlantic Cities: Our Favorite Maps of 2013
Dustin Cable's stunning Racial Dot Map actually put every person in America (308,745,538 of us) on a map as individual dots of different colors.
14. Business Insider: Where Drivers Drive On The Left And Where They Drive On The Right
15. Top Public Health Risks
Sep 14, 2013
Saturday Links
1. Population Reference Bureau has a great resource that maps their 2013 World Population Data Sheet on an interactive map. Here is one example:
2. Modern family redefined: Say 'goodbye' to the typical American family
A New York Times story looking at the skyrocketing rate of birth outside of marriage among women under 30 (now over 50 percent of such births) pointed up one of the key differences between marriages and cohabitating couples:
Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together. While in some countries such relationships endure at rates that resemble marriages, in the United States they are more than twice as likely to dissolve than marriages. In a summary of research, Pamela Smock and Fiona Rose Greenland, both of the University of Michigan, reported that two-thirds of couples living together split up by the time their child turned 10.
The research, in aggregate, says that things are changing for the American family, and quickly. There may be ways for the government to address the trend: increased financial benefits for getting and staying married, for example, or a macro-effort to actively battle rising economic inequality, but systematic change will be a long hard fight. The research seems to suggest that such a fight is worth the effort.
4. Young People Are Still Dropping Out Of The Labor Force
Kids are likely staying in school for longer (or avoiding work altogether) thanks to a tough labor market. On the other hand, the 65-and-over crowd has seen the sharpest uptick in participation. The financial crisis bled retirement savings, forcing older Americans to stay on the job for longer.
5. How Big Data Is Transforming The Mobile Industry
6. Millennials Now Bringing Their Parents Along On Job Interviews
7. Why Bigger Is No Longer Better
Every manager and entrepreneur wants to grow their business. Get bigger and more powerful, the thinking goes, and you'll have it made. The added heft will give you the upper hand in negotiations with suppliers and the doors of customers will swing wide open.
That used to be true to a certain extent, but not so much anymore. Digital technology has markedly evened out the playing field. Startups become billion dollar companies overnight while venerable brands like Kodak and Blockbuster hit the skids.
This turn of events presents considerable challenges for managers. While there are still some advantages to scale, the disadvantages often outweigh them. You have lots of customers, a large workforce and stodgy institutional investors to keep happy, all of which contribute to strategic rigidity. To compete in the new economy, we need a new playbook. ...
8. Can For-Profit Corporations Have Religious Purposes?
...Okay, some may respond (e.g., here), churches and other organizations have free exercise rights, but for-profit corporations do not. But why would this be? An individual sole proprietor — of, say, a kosher deli, to use Will's example — would clearly be able to press a religious liberty claim, whether or not she hopes the deli will make her rich (and whether or not she commits to donate her earnings to a religious charity). Does this individual lose such rights if she incorporated? Does that somehow make her religious motivations any less sincere? Any less judicially cognizable? I can't see how. What, then, if the deli owner formed a partnership with her equally devout brother? Would that matter? And, again, if an informal partnership would be okay, why would the adoption of a corporate form and limited liability matter?
The consequence of the "no religious liberty for corporations" position is that individuals who would like to go into business are penalized if they seek to go into business without any potential recourse, under RFRA or otherwise. The choice presented by the state is go into business or stay true to your religious beliefs. Although I suggested otherwise before, it seems to me this approach imposes a substantial burden on the exercise of religion. Whether this burden can be justified in a given case is a separate question, but the burden is there. ...
9. Five Insights About Private Property from Aquinas
- God designed creation to support life, especially human life. ...
- Private property engenders good stewardship. ...
- Private ownership supports order in society. ...
- Private property helps maintain peace in communities. ...
- Private property benefits the community. ...
10. Germans Revolt Against Germany's Green Energy Revolution
11. Brussels fears European 'industrial massacre' sparked by energy costs
Europe's industry is being ravaged by exorbitant energy costs and an over-valued euro, blighting efforts to reverse years of global manufacturing decline.
12. What If Roads Lasted Twice As Long?
If there were a better way to take care of roads in the Lone Star State, it would be a very valuable idea.
Enter Sahadat Hossain, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington and the man behind a new state program to shore up crumbling roads using an underground support system of recycled plastic pins.
"Just think about it," Hossain says. "You need one million dollars to repair something. Or you can use a sustainable recycling material and do it for $200- or $300,000. You don't need to be an engineer to see that."
The scheme's low price is matched by its high effectiveness. In a two-year feasibility study that concluded this August, sections of Texas Route 287 with 10-foot-long pins drilled into the roadway slope moved only one to two inches. The control sections, left unsupported, moved 15 to 16 inches. ...
... The input cost of the pins, which have previously been tested in Missouri, is less than 50 percent that of traditional highway support measures like retaining walls. And because they are made from recycled plastic—each pin contains about 500 soda bottles—the pin concept turns plastic's non-decomposition from an environmental headache to an engineering solution. ...
14. Why So Many Articles Have Terrible Headlines Online
15. The 11 Most Common Grammatical Mistakes And How To Avoid Them
16. What would happen if your church was reviewed on TripAdvisor?
Churches spend a lot of time on the big things, like a glorious anthem and prophetic preaching. But a UMC pastor says small details matter, too, like lights that burn brightly, signs that make sense and greeters who greet. ...
Jul 27, 2013
Saturday Links
1. Mark Buchanan asks Is Economics a Science or a Religion?
2. Poverty has moved to the suburbs
I don't think this should be seen as necessarily a bad thing. A few decades ago, the idea was to "warehouse" the poor in large urban complexes. There has been an intentional effort at dispersal through various means including creating mixed-income neighborhoods.
3. Crime has plummeted in the rich world, even amid the recession.
4. 5 Charts That Perfectly Capture The Incredible Rise Of China
5. How (and why) Africa should solve its own problems
Africa cannot rely on outside people to come and feed our poor or treat our sick, says African businessman and philanthropist Mo Ibrahim. The key is good governance, in both the public and private sectors.
6. World Bank: Africa held back by land ownership confusion
Africa's economic growth is being held back by confusion over who owns vast swathes of agricultural land, according to a World Bank report.
7. Deforestation in Africa's Congo Basin rainforest slows
Tree loss in one of the world's largest rainforests has slowed, a study suggests.
Satellite images of Africa's Congo Basin reveal that deforestation has fallen by about a third since 2000.
Researchers believe this is partly because of a focus on mining and oil rather than commercial agriculture, where swathes of forest are cleared. ...
8. Brazil's Evangelicals A Growing Force In Prayer, Politics
... Recent polls show that evangelical Christianity is the fastest-growing sect in Brazil. According to the Pew Research Center, 22 percent of the Brazilian population identifies as evangelical Christian — up from 5 percent in 1970. Unfortunately for the Catholic Church, most of them switched from Roman Catholicism.
These days, only about 62 percent of people in Brazil say they are Catholic. In absolute numbers, however, this still makes Brazil the country with the most Catholics in the world. ...
9. For Developing World, a Streamlined Facebook
MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook has been quietly working for more than two years on a project that is vital to expanding its base of 1.1 billion users: getting the social network onto the billions of cheap, simple "feature phones" that have largely disappeared in America and Europe but are still the norm in developing countries like India and Brazil.
Facebook soon plans to announce the first results of the initiative, which it calls Facebook for Every Phone: More than 100 million people, or roughly one out of eight of its mobile users worldwide, now regularly access the social network from more than 3,000 different models of feature phones, some costing as little as $20.
Many of those users, who rank among the world's poorest people, pay little or nothing to download their Facebook news feeds and photos, with the data usage subsidized by phone carriers and manufacturers. ...
10. The Huge Threat to Capitalism That Republicans Are Ignoring (I don't agree with a couple of points but I think his thesis is spot on.)
11. Big Racial Divide over Zimmerman Verdict
12. The Wal-Mart Slayer: How Publix's People-First Culture Is Winning The Grocer War
Family-run Publix is both the largest employee-owned company and the most profitable grocer in America. Those two facts are linked, and they might be the formula for fending off Bentonville's retail behemoth. ...
... When a middle-aged woman asks about a box of crackers, no aisle number is blurted out. Instead, an employee races off to find the item, just as he is trained to do. At checkout, shoppers move to the front quickly, thanks to a two-customer-per-line goal enforced by proprietary, predictive staffing software. Baggers, a foggy memory at most large supermarket chains, carry purchases to the parking lot. Even Publix's president, Todd Jones, who started out as a bagger 33 years ago, stoops down to pick up specks of trash on the store floor.
"We believe that there are three ways to differentiate: service, quality and price," Jones says. "You've got to be good at two of them, and the best at one. We make service our number one, then quality and then price."...
... Publix, the seventh-largest private company in the U.S. ($27.5 billion in sales) and one of the least understood thanks to decades of media reticence, is also the largest employee-owned company in America. For 83 years Publix has thrived by delivering top-rated service to its shoppers by turning thousands of its cashiers, baggers, butchers and bakers into the company's largest collective shareholders. All staffers who have put in 1,000 work hours and a year of employment receive an additional 8.5% of their total pay in the form of Publix stock. (Though private, the board sets the stock price every quarter based on an independent valuation; it's pegged at $26.90 now, up nearly 20% already this year.) How rich can employees get? According to Publix, a store manager who has worked at the company for 20 years and earns between $100,000 and $130,000 likely has $300,000 in stock and has received another $30,000 in dividends. ...
13. Grocery shopping online: Can it replace trips to the store?
The website mySupermarket.com compares the prices of groceries online and works to reduce shipping costs. But a limited selection means grocery store runs aren't a things of the past just yet.
14. 25 Everyday Things Made Obsolete This Century. What would you add to the list?
Jul 20, 2013
Saturday Links
1. Public Religion Research Institute: Survey | Do Americans Believe Capitalism and Government are Working?: Religious Left, Religious Right and the Future of the Economic Debate
2. Gallup reports Sub-Saharan Africa Is Wildly Optimistic About Its Future
3. U.S. could lead world oil production by 2017, study says
Domestic shale oil production could shoot up to 5 million barrels per day by 2017, making the United States the top oil producing country in the world, according to a researcher at Harvard Kennedy School.
4. Will Europe Hit a Demographic Tipping Point?
... In 1968 Paul Ehrlich’s doomsday tome The Population Bomb predicted mass starvation and civilizational collapse in much of the world due to overpopulation. But the more serious problem – particularly in traditionally higher-income countries – today is actually too few, not too many new people. The pivot to seeing this as the problem has come through something very basic: pension math. Across the developed world, public pension systems built on the assumption of continued population growth are now facing an actuarial day of reckoning as the bills come due while birth rates have plummeted.
A society needs a total fertility rate – that is, the average number of children born to each woman – of 2.1 just to maintain its population without immigration. Some European countries like France (2.03) and the UK (1.98) are in reasonably good shape, but they are the exception. The total fertility rate in Greece is 1.43, in Germany 1.36, in Spain 1.36, in Portugal 1.30, and in Poland 1.30. Much of southern and central Europe hovers near the so-called “lowest-low” rate of 1.3 in which the population is naturally being cut in half every 45 years.
Simple birth rates alone have caused some to posit a societal going out of business sale in Europe. However, just as extrapolation of high population growth rates in the past led to wildly alarmist claims that proved false, so today we must be careful about not proclaiming Europe is doomed. But with the population on tap to be halved every generation, the runway to turn things around is difficult to conjure. And while we’ve seen many countries make the shift from high to low birth rates, there isn’t a huge track record of success in the other direction. ...
5. Hunger Makes People Work Harder, and Other Stupid Things We Used to Believe About Poverty
The article includes this interesting graph:
6. Forget Microlending. India Needs Basic, Competent Credit Reporting - Businessweek
Development economists talk a lot about credit. Figure out a way to get it to people in a developing economy, rather than just large companies or the state itself, and you can encourage small-scale risk-taking. Microlending offers very small loans to individuals, often $100 or less. The idea won Muhammad Yunus a Nobel Prize in 2006. More recently, microfinance and mobile banking have offered ways to save and insure on a small scale, allowing people take risks with their own money. Speaking in Mumbai earlier this month, K. C. Chakrabarty, deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India, offered an additional way to expand credit: better credit reporting. No shepherds with phones, no happy mothers of four with new sewing machines. Just credit reporting, plain old attention to detail, and administrative competence.
7. Why We Need to Treat America's Poorest Neighborhoods Like Developing Countries
The article includes maps showing life expectancy across several metropolitan areas. Here is the one for my hometown, Kansas City.
8. Racial Disparities in Life Spans Narrow, but Persist
The gap in life expectancy between black and white Americans is at its narrowest since the federal government started systematically tracking it in the 1930s, but a difference of nearly four years remains, and federal researchers have detailed why in a new report.
9. The Unsettling Link Between Sprawl and Suicide
A new scientific working paper (spotted by Tim De Chant of Per Square Mile) contends that as population density decreases, the suicide rate among young people increases. This effect becomes particularly pronounced below 300 inhabitants per square kilometer — roughly the density of San Diego County.
10. Big Data, for Better or Worse: 90% of World's Data Generated Over Last Two Years
11. The one event that destroyed the PC industry
12. Tweets that got people arrested
13. Religion & Wikipedia: The 'Edit Wars' Rage On
Scientists have analyzed page edits in 10 editions of Wikipedia to determine the topics most often fought over by editors of the open encyclopedia. The most debated topics included many religious subjects, like Jesus and God, according to research done by Taha Yasseri, Anselm Spoerri, Mark Graham, and János Kertész.
Rather than merely citing pages that changed a lot, they identified pages involved in "edit wars," that involved editors making changes that were almost instantly undone by another contributor. This proved the best method of finding controversial pages, as pages often updated could simply belong to a rapidly changing field or topic. However, pages with words and phrases constantly removed and reinserted indicated a passionate disagreement surrounding the issue at hand.
The most controversial pages across all ten editions of Wikipedia were:
- Israel
- Adolf Hitler
- The Holocaust
- God
Other controversial subjects were Jesus, the Prophet Muhammad, and Christianity.
14. The curious case of the fall in crime
... Cherished social theories have been discarded. Conservatives who insisted that the decline of the traditional nuclear family and growing ethnic diversity would unleash an unstoppable crime wave have been proved wrong. Young people are increasingly likely to have been brought up by one parent and to have played a lot of computer games. Yet they are far better behaved than previous generations. Left-wingers who argued that crime could never be curbed unless inequality was reduced look just as silly.
There is no single cause of the decline; rather, several have coincided. Western societies are growing older, and most crimes are committed by young men. Policing has improved greatly in recent decades, especially in big cities such as New York and London, with forces using computers to analyse the incidence of crime; in some parts of Manhattan this helped to reduce the robbery rate by over 95%. The epidemics of crack cocaine and heroin appear to have burnt out.
The biggest factor may be simply that security measures have improved. Car immobilisers have killed joyriding; bulletproof screens, security guards and marked money have all but done for bank robbery. Alarms and DNA databases have increased the chance a burglar will be caught. At the same time, the rewards for burglary have fallen because electronic gizmos are so cheap. Even small shops now invest in CCTV cameras and security tags. Some crimes now look very risky—and that matters because, as every survey of criminals shows, the main deterrent to crime is the fear of being caught. ...
15. By 2030, Half of All Colleges Will Collapse
May 25, 2013
Saturday Links
1. The Atlantic says Just 27% of BA's Have Jobs Related to Their Major? Don't Believe the Fed's New Stat
2. 100 fastest growing inner city businesses
From a pet relocation service, a wine lifestyle marketer, to a scrap metal regenerator, America's urban core is home to a variety of fast-growing companies. Here's the top 100, as ranked by the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City.
3. Factory safety: Battle of the brands
... This approach has been criticised by the Workers Rights Consortium because, unlike its plan, it contains no binding commitment to help fund improvements to make factories safe. Yet it is debatable whether wealthy factory owners really lack funds to make factories safe, as opposed to the lack of incentive due to the Bangladesh government's failure to enforce its own building code. WalMart points out that the government has now started to close unsafe fatories, 19 so far (presumably because of the constant protests by locals since the collapse of Rana Plaza). It says its new approach will detect unsafe factories significantly faster than the Workers Rights Consortium's plan.
Perhaps it would be better if everyone agreed on a common approach. But if there must be competition, it is surely better that it is over how to make factories safer than the alternative.
4. Economist Timothy Taylor with some interesting thoughts on Spending on America's Pets
5. Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
While psychologists can't know exactly what goes on inside our heads, they have, through surveys and laboratory studies, come up with a set of traits that correlate well with conspiracy belief. In 2010, Swami and a co-author summarized this research in The Psychologist, a scientific journal. They found, perhaps surprisingly, that believers are more likely to be cynical about the world in general and politics in particular. Conspiracy theories also seem to be more compelling to those with low self-worth, especially with regard to their sense of agency in the world at large. Conspiracy theories appear to be a way of reacting to uncertainty and powerlessness.
6. Why You Feel Smart Around Some People But Dumb Around Others
... Experiments show that when people report feeling comfortable with a conversational partner, they are judged by those partners and by observers as actually being more witty.
It's just one example of the powerful influence that social factors can have on intelligence. Research in this area should prompt us to think about intelligence not as a "lump of something that's in our heads," as the psychologist Joshua Aronson puts it, but as "a transaction among people."...
... This research has important implications for the way we educate children and the way we manage employees. For one thing, we should replace high-stakes, one-shot tests with the kind of unobtrusive and ongoing assessments that give teachers and managers a more accurate sense of people's true abilities. We should also put in place techniques for reducing anxiety and building self-confidence that take advantage of our social natures. And we should ensure that the social climate in schools and workplaces is one of warmth and trust, not competition and exclusion.
Professor Aronson calls the doltishness induced by an uncomfortable social situation "conditional stupidity." We should use that insight to create the conditions for brilliance. ...
7. Do those who doubt climate catastrophism lack scientific credibility?
8. Everything Wrong With America In One Simple Image (INFOGRAPHIC) The article is a bit over the top, but this graphic was interesting:
9. America's Declining Teen Birth Rate, Explained in 3 Charts
10. Suburbia Needs Jesus, Too Interesting piece that has caused some buzz in social media. Her point about the centrality of everyday life is something I resonate with.
12. Methodists May Discourage Those Over 45 from Becoming Pastors
13. How does copyright work in space?
CHRIS HADFIELD has captured the world's heart, judging by the 14m YouTube views of his free-fall rendition of David Bowie's "Space Oddity", recorded on the International Space Station (ISS). The Canadian astronaut's clear voice and capable guitar-playing were complemented by his facility in moving around in the microgravity of low-earth orbit. But when the man fell to Earth in a neat and safe descent a few days ago, after a five-month stay in orbit, should he have been greeted by copyright police? Commander Hadfield was only 250 miles (400 km) up, so he was still subject to terrestrial intellectual-property regimes, which would have applied even if he had flown the "100,000 miles" mentioned in the song's lyrics or millions of kilometres to Mars. His five-minute video had the potential to create a tangled web of intellectual-property issues. How does copyright work in space? ...
Apr 06, 2013
Saturday Links
1. Atlantic: Could Earth's Population Peak in 2050?
"For the past two decades, demographers have generally agreed that global population growth will continue to inch steadily higher in the coming century, raising concerns about everything from pollution to housing to the world's water supply.
But a new study out of Spain suggests those estimates may be way off—we're talking several billion people off—and that the earth's population could instead peak as soon as 2050. Applying a mathematical model to global population trends, these researchers believe that there will be fewer people living on earth in 2100 than there are today. ..."
Since I started studying demography thirty years ago, low fertility estimates seem the closest to actual outcomes. People seem to be moving to lower fertility rates faster than most expected.
2. Speaking of world population, Chatham House writes about The End of Youth
"Advances in medicine and health care mean that people all over the globe are living longer, much longer. At the same time mothers in most countries are having fewer babies. The combination is a demographic timebomb. Sarah Harper looks at the challenges that lie ahead and the changes needed to cope with a grey new world."
3. Pew has published an interesting report on Demographics of Asian Americans
4. Forbes on Why China Is Finally Abandoning Its One Child Policy
"The policy was originally justified as necessary because of excess population and to promote economic development. Much has been written and can be found on the Internet about this policy and the current and long-term effects it is having and will have on China. The reluctance by China's central government to abandon the one child policy is not out of a failure to recognize its shortcomings. Rather, it is because the policy has been highly successful in achieving a principal objective, a unification of the public in support of an unelected, autocratic central government."
5. World Bank Aims To Eliminate Extreme Poverty By 2030
To reach that goal, Kim said the world need to reduce the number of people living below the poverty line of $1.25 per day to 3 percent globally by 2030, and raise the per capita incomes of the bottom 40 percent of every developing country.
The 3 percent level is a new target for the World Bank, which estimated in 2010 that 21 percent of the global population, or 1.2 billion people, lived extreme poverty.
Some World Bank estimates have put the 3 percent target at about 600 million people living below the poverty line by 2030.
6. Susan Brown writes about A 'gray divorce' boom
Until recently, it would have been fair to say that older people simply did not get divorced. Fewer than 10% of those who got divorced in 1990 were ages 50 or older. Today, 1 in 4 people getting divorced is in this age group.
7. Science reports on the prospects of One Drug to Shrink All Tumors.
8. The Genetic Literacy Project on Monsanto Protection Act? Separating the facts from the fury
9. Dean Kalahar says Economics Is Easy, And Can Be Learned In 5 Minutes
10. Rebecca Schuman on why you shouldn't pursue that Ph.D.: Thesis Hatement
11. Facebook 'Dislike' Button Not A Good Idea, Says Product Engineer Bob Baldwin In Reddit AMA
12. Finally, we have an answer to one of the most important questions of our generation: How Many Spaces After a Period? Ending the Debate.
13. ABP News with some interesting data on the future of Mega Churches: Small is big for Millennials
14. Goal Control 4D. How referees will be automatically informed of goals in World Cup 2014.
15. For those of you who have deficiencies in your cultural education about all things Whovian, here is a primer for you: 'Doctor Who' Explained in 25 GIFs
Mar 23, 2013
Saturday Links
1. Scientific American has some interesting thoughts on How Your Language Affects Your Wealth and Health
... Different languages have different ways of talking about the future. Some languages, such as English, Korean, and Russian, require their speakers to refer to the future explicitly. Every time English-speakers talk about the future, they have to use future markers such as "will" or "going to." In other languages, such as Mandarin, Japanese, and German, future markers are not obligatory. The future is often talked about similar to the way present is talked about and the meaning is understood from the context. A Mandarin speaker who is going to go to a seminar might say "Wo qu ting jiangzuo," which translates to "I go listen seminar." Languages such as English constantly remind their speakers that future events are distant. For speakers of languages such as Mandarin future feels closer. As a consequence, resisting immediate impulses and investing for the future is easier for Mandarin speakers. ...
2. Fair Trade 2.0? Coffee's Economics, Rewritten by Farmers
3. R. J. Moeller qutoes from John Mackey's (Whole Foods CEO) new book:
"Capitalism has a purpose beyond just making money. I think the critics of capitalism have got it in this very small box. That it's all about money. It's based in being greedy, selfish and exploitative. And yet, I haven't found it to be that way. Most of the hundreds of entrepreneurs I know and have met did not start their business primarily out of a desire to make money. Not that there's anything wrong with making money. My body cannot function unless it produces red-blood cells. No red-blood cells and I'm a dead man. But that's not the purpose of my life.
Similarly, a business cannot exist unless it produces a profit . . . but that's not the only reason it exists."
4. David Henderson with thoughts on the economic impact of marriage: "Get Married and Stay Married"
When I was writing a review of Dwight Lee's and Richard McKenzie's excellent book, Getting Rich in America: 8 Simple Rules for Building a Fortune and a Satisfying Life, I called Dwight to ask a question and we got talking about Rule #5: Get Married and Stay Married. Dwight pointed out that if you follow the other 7 rules but don't get married or stay married, you have a substantial probability of building a fortune and a satisfying life. But, he said, if you don't get married and stay married, you tend not to follow at least some of the other 7 rules.
5. With more thoughts on the economic impact of marriage, Glen Reynolds reflects on The other marriage inequality
While the upscale college-educated crowd continues to marry at very high rates, marriage rates are plummeting among those further down on the socioeconomic ladder.
6. Steven Pearlstein with a thoughtful essay: Is capitalism moral?
... A useful debate about the morality of capitalism must get beyond libertarian nostrums that greed is good, what's mine is mine and whatever the market produces is fair. It should also acknowledge that there is no moral imperative to redistribute income and opportunity until everyone has secured a berth in a middle class free from economic worries. If our moral obligation is to provide everyone with a reasonable shot at economic success within a market system that, by its nature, thrives on unequal outcomes, then we ought to ask not just whether government is doing too much or too little, but whether it is doing the right things.
7. Matt Ridley with an interesting piece on how Obsidian chronicles ancient trade. This conclusion was interesting.
Instead, Dr. Butzer argues that Sargon's conquest itself caused the collapse of trade by destroying cities and disrupting what had till then been "an inter-networked world-economy, once extending from the Aegean to the Indus Valley." In other words, as with the end of the Roman empire, the collapse of trade caused the collapse of civilization more than the other way around.
8. Speaking of economic History, Rewriting Biblical history? Agriculture might be 5,000 years older than believed.
A new find suggests farmers in Bible lands built channels for irrigation long before historians thought they did, allowing for cultivated vineyards, olives, wheat and barley.
9. Americans Just Keep Driving Less And Less
10. The New York Times on New Reasons to Change Light Bulbs. (To LEDs)
11. Science 2.0 on A Biological Basis For Gender Differences In Math?
... "Educational systems could be improved by acknowledging that, in general, boys and girls are different," said University of Missouri biologist David Geary in their statement. "For example, in trying to close the sex gap in math scores, the reading gap was left behind. Now, our study has found that the difference between girls' and boys' reading scores was three times larger than the sex difference in math scores. Girls' higher scores in reading could lead to advantages in admissions to certain university programs, such as marketing, journalism or literature, and subsequently careers in those fields. Boys lower reading scores could correlate to problems in any career, since reading is essential in most jobs."
Generally, when conditions are good, the math gap increases and the reading gap decreases and when conditions are bad the math gap decreases and the reading gap increases. This pattern remained consistent within nations as well as among them, according to the work by Geary and Gijsbert Stoet of the University of Leeds that included testing performance data from 1.5 million 15-year-olds in 75 nations. ...
12. Malcolm Gladwell was half right. Professor Jonah Berger on his new book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On.
13. Scientific Explanations for Why Spoilers Are So Horrible
14. Mashable has great advice with 5 Alternatives to Unfriending Someone on Facebook
15. David Brooks with insight on How Movements Recover
... Two rival reform movements arose to restore the integrity of Catholicism. Those in the first movement, the Donatists, believed the church needed to purify itself and return to its core identity. ...
... In the fourth century, another revival movement arose, embraced by Augustine, who was Bishop of Hippo. The problem with the Donatists, Augustine argued, is that they are too static. They try to seal off an ark to ride out the storm, but they end up sealing themselves in. They cut themselves off from new circumstances and growth.
Augustine, as his magisterial biographer Peter Brown puts it, "was deeply preoccupied by the idea of the basic unity of the human race." He reacted against any effort to divide people between those within the church and those permanently outside. ....
16. A great piece by someone who considers them unaffiliated with any religion. Every Christian and congregation needs to reflect on the insignificance of the church in this writer's life. His tribe is growing: The significant insignificance of religion
Feb 09, 2013
Saturday Links
1. I love maps and charts. Naturally, I was drawn to this: 36 Maps That Explain The Entire World. Here is just one example:
2. Roger Pielke, Jr., says It's Time to Bury the Easterlin Paradox.
"The Easterlin paradox suggest that in terms of human happiness -- a squishy concept to be sure -- there is a limit to economic growth beyond which there really is just no point in attaining more wealth. Further, a decoupling between income and happiness at some threshold would imply that GDP would not be a good measure of welfare, we would need some other metric.
A recent paper (PDF) by Daniel Sacks, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers argues that the Easterlin paradox is also wrong. ..."
3. John Danforth thinks We Need Less Religion in our Politics and Less Politics in our Religion.
4. I opined about this in yesterday's post, but I'm linking it again. One of the better Salon pieces I've read. When liberals ignore injustice
"Why isn't there more outrage about the president's unilateral targeted assassination program on the left?"
5. Arnold Kling with an interesting piece on the role of Jews in the rise of the modern urbanized economic order. The Unintended Consequences of God
"In those days, most people were farmers, for whom literacy’s costs generally outweighed its benefits. However, in an urbanized society with skilled occupations, literacy pays off. As urbanization gradually increased in the late Middle Ages, Jews came to fill high-skilled occupations. Botticini and Eckstein argue that literacy, rather than persecution, is what led Jews into these occupations."
6. New Geography wants to know Is Urbanism The New Trickle-Down Economics?
"But while progressives would clearly mock this policy [trickle-down economics], modern day urbanism often resembles nothing so much as trickle-down economics, though this time mostly advocated by those who would self-identify as being from the left. The idea is that through investments catering to the fickle and mobile educated elite and the high end businesses that employ and entertain them, cities can be rejuvenated in a way that somehow magically benefits everybody and is socially fair."
7. NPR has a nice piece on mini-reactors. Are Mini-Reactors The Future Of Nuclear Power?
8. Mark Perry excerpts a quote from green libertarian John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market.
“Capitalism is the greatest creation humanity has done for social cooperation. It has lifted humanity out of the dirt. In statistics we discovered when we were researching the book, about 200 years ago when capitalism was created, 85% of the people alive lived on $1 a day. Today, that number is 16%. Still too high, but capitalism is wiping out poverty across the world. 200 years ago illiteracy rates were 90%. Today, they are down to about 14%. 200 years ago the average lifespan was 30. Today it is 68 across the world, 78 in the States, and almost 82 in Japan. This is due to business. This is due to capitalism. And it doesn’t get credit for it. Most of the time, business is portrayed by its enemies as selfish and greedy and exploitative, yet it’s the greatest value creator in the world.”
9. Economist Gavin Kennedy with some interesting thoughts on the relationship between the state and the economy in developing nations:
The problem is to achieve the right balance between a competitive market economy and an effective state: markets where possible; the state where necessary.
10. Climate Change: Key Data Points from Pew Research. Highlights some interesting shifts in the public's priorities.
11. Great piece about yet another way family life is changing. Yes, I’m a Homemaker
I’m a guy. My wife works. We’ve got no kids. I’m a stay-at-home dude.
"... What a sweet picture this conjures: the stay-at-home dad nurturing his children, looking after the house and helping support his wife in her budding career and shelving his own big ambitions for later. Now it gets a little awkward. There is no adorable kid, nor plans to have one. No starter home that needs knocking into shape. I'm not just doing this temporarily until I find something meaningful to do. I’m actually a full-time homemaker ... not stay-at-home dad but stay-at-home dude. A conversational pause. Where do you mentally file this guy? Usually I just change the subject. ..."
12. The Atlantic reports that Women Are Often Remarkably Reluctant to Ask for Help Around the House
A new study shows that high-earning women are more likely to let their houses be messy than to hire a housekeeper or get their husbands and kids to pitch in. ...
... "You can purchase substitutes for your own time, you can get your husband to do more, or you can all just do less," Killewald says. "Whether women outsource housework in particular has less to do with resources, but whether or not paid labor is viewed as an appropriate strategy for undertaking domestic work.
Doing less housework seems to be a popular option. ...
13. Business insider reports on a finding that is no shock to me: Men Really Do Have A Harder Time Reading Other People's Emotions.
Psychiatrists have concluded that males take longer to assess facial expressions as their brains have to work twice as hard to work out whether another person looks friendly or intelligent.
14. Daniel Kirk with a thoughtful piece Homosexuality under the Reign of Christ
15. Facebook Unfriending Has Real-Life Consequences
In particular, researchers found that 40% of people say they would avoid someone who unfriended them on Facebook, while 50% say they would not avoid a person who unfriended them. Women were more likely than men to avoid someone who unfriended them, the researchers found.
16. The Future of Librarians in an EBook World
... Libraries are responding to the decline of print in a variety of creative ways, trying to remain relevant – especially to younger people – by embracing the new technology. Many, such as New York’s Queens Public Library, are reinventing themselves as centers for classes, job training, and simply hanging out. In one radical example, a new $1.5 million library scheduled to open in San Antonio, Texas, this fall will be completely book-free, with its collection housed exclusively on tablets, laptops, and e-readers. “Think of an Apple store,” the Bexar County judge who is leading the effort told NPR. It’s a flashy and seductive package.
But libraries are about more than just e-readers or any other media, as important as those things are. They are about more than just buildings such as the grand edifices erected by Carnegie money, or the sleek and controversial new design for the New York Public Library’s central branch. They are also about human beings and their relationships, specifically, the relationship between librarians and patrons. And that is the relationship that the foundation created by Microsoft co-founder’s Paul G. Allen is seeking to build in a recent round of grants to libraries in the Pacific Northwest. ...
17. 3-D Printing just gets more amazing. A 3D Printer That Generates Human Embryonic Stem Cells
3-D printers can produce gun parts, aircraft wings, food and a lot more, but this new 3-D printed product may be the craziest thing yet: human embryonic stem cells. Using stem cells as the "ink" in a 3-D printer, researchers in Scotland hope to eventually build 3-D printed organs and tissues. A team at Heriot-Watt University used a specially designed valve-based technique to deposit whole, live cells onto a surface in a specific pattern.
Jan 02, 2013
Dec 29, 2012
Saturday Links
(Like the Kruse Kronicle on Facebook if you want links to daily posts to appear in your Facebook feed.)
I hope you had a great Christmas and are enjoying the holidays.
1. The Huffington Post offers their top religion stories of 2012: 2012 Religion Stories: The Top 10
2. David Gushee reflects on Glen Stassen's A Thicker Jesus: Incarnational Discipleship in a Secular Age: The illnesses of American Christianity
"... The first kind of Christianity avoids reactionary authoritarianism but is often a therapeutic or vanilla mush that fails to ask anything of anybody out of fear of giving offense. The second kind of Christianity offers stern, clear moral directives that attract people seeking the "specific instruction, even confrontation that calls us to grow in discipleship" (p. 6), but disastrously embraces right-wing ideology and baptizes that as the content of Christianity.
Both of these versions of Christianity are so deeply flawed, says Stassen, that both are contributing to the alarming spread of secularism in the U.S. The first version of Christianity is so thin as to lack any particular reason why one would want to get out of bed on Sunday and go to church; the second is so reactionary as to drive thoughtful people into an anti-religious posture if they conclude that religion equals right-wing authoritarianism.
I believe this is a stark but actually quite accurate depiction of the primary problems afflicting the Protestantisms of the left and of the right in the current U.S. setting. ..."
3. When New England Progressives Won't Tolerate Evangelicals. "Once a center of 19th-century evangelism, Northfield, Mass., is unsettled by the prospect of a school with religious aims."
4. Peter Enns with another provocative post: What do Turkey, Bethlehem, and Tennessee Have in Common? They Don't Bode Well for the Conservative Christian Subculture
5. Peter Liethart offers a book review of Peter Brown's new book, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 Ad, at Christianity Today: How the Early Church Made Peace with Prosperity. (And, no, I don't know why everyone seems to be Peter this week ... Enns, Liethart, and Brown.)
6. Why Latin Americans top the happiness rankings
"While not exclusive to Latin America, the culture of family, support, and living a life to spend time with your family, I think, is an important part of Latin American culture that keeps people positive. Being with those close to you and finding other friends and partners that value that way of life is a key part of Latin American culture. That might be the main reason why people remain positive: they are never truly alone. Interestingly, many discussions and documentaries about immigrant groups in the United States show an internal conflict among many who move to the US and who do not wish to lose their support systems in a new culture rooted in individualism. While being motivated and entrepreneurial is valued, a life being with your family, where you are never truly alone, is the basis for many cultures in many parts of the world. Many new Americans frown on the thought that children can detach themselves from their family at 18 years of age. They believe people can only truly thrive as a family."
7. In contrast to Latin American happiness based in family connection, this survey of British children revealed that A 'dad' is tenth most popular Christmas list request for children.
8. Christian Science Monitor reports on Parental leave global comparison: US still among least generous
9. And yet another story on familial collections China orders children to visit their elderly parents.
10. Scientific American reports some positive news: Early Childhood Obesity Rates Might Be Slowing Nation-Wide
11. Men may want to think twice before taking up yoga. It seems men are more prone to serious injury from yoga. Wounded Warrior Pose
12. What are the ten most popular books of all time? The 10 Most Read Books In The World
13. Traditional Books On Decline, Survey Says
"A Pew Internet Research Center survey released Thursday found that the percentage of Americans aged 16 and older who read an e-book grew from 16 percent in 2011 to 23 percent this year. Readers of traditional books dropped from 72 percent to 67 percent. Overall, those reading books of any kind dropped from 78 percent to 75 percent, a shift Pew called statistically insignificant."
14. Here are nine interesting findings about state-by-state data from the Census Bureau: Here Are The States Where People Are Leaving, Moving To, And Having Lots Of Babies
- Puerto Rico, Vermont, and Rhode Island are the only states (and territory) that saw a net decrease in population over the year.
- The fastest growing region was the South (1.06% population growth) followed by the West (1.03% population growth).
- North Dakota and the District of Columbia had the highest population growth, with 2.5% and 2.3% population growth, respectively. Texas, Wyoming, and Utah also saw major growth.
- West Virginia and Maine are the only two states where people are dying faster than they are being born, with 0.93 and 0.99 births for each death.
- Utah (3.44) and Alaska (3.33) had the highest birth to death ratio in 2012. That means 3.44 babies were born for each death in Utah.
- Domestic migration determines the rate that people leave and enter states to and from other states. Per capita, more natives left New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island to move somewhere else than any other states.
- On the other hand, people flocked to North Dakota, D.C., Wyoming and South Carolina.
- The states that had the highest rates of international migration — that is, the rate of immigrants coming in — were Hawaii, New Jersey, Florida, New York and D.C.
- Puerto Rico is seeing a massive exodus — 1% of their population left last year.
15. When we think of transportation in the United States, few of us think about river and coastal water transportation. Yet a great many goods and commodities are shipped on our rivers. The Midwest drought is having an impact on a major artery of that transportation network. The Mississippi River's Water Levels Are Dropping, And Could Shut Down Trade Next Week
16. Facebook?! Twitter?! Instagram?! We Did That 40 Years Ago. "Three decades before Yelp and Craigslist, there was the Community Memory Terminal. ..."
17. America's Stuff Is Getting Really Old, And That's Bullish
"In other words, Americans are increasingly likely to have to purchase and replace these goods some time soon as they get more and more worn out. That's bullish for spending, jobs, and the economy as a whole."
18. From right here in my hometown, just a mile or two from where I live: In a Kansas City Neighborhood, Deep Investments and an Uncertain Future. The Atlantic Cities reports on Kansas City's experiments with Green Impact Zones.
19. Why are men, in the aggregate, better navigators than women? National Geographic: Of Men, Navigation, and Zits
"... Yet a few differences between the sexes do seem to hold up to scrutiny. One is spatial abilities. If men look at an object, for example, they are slightly faster at guessing what it would look like if it were rotated 180 degrees. There are plenty of women who do better than individual men. But overall there's a stasticially significant difference in their average performance. This kind of difference carries over from one culture to another. It's even detectable in babies. ...
... Whenever we reflect on human evolution, it pays to compare our species to other animals. And in the case of spatial abilities, the comparison is fascinating. Almost a century ago, the psychologist Helen Hubbet found that male rats could get through a maze faster than females. The difference can also be found in a number of other species. ...
... Clint and his colleagues propose a different explanation: male spatial ability is not an adaptation so much as a side effect. Males produce testosterone as they develop, and the hormone has a clear benefit in terms of reproduction, increasing male fertility. But testosterone also happens to produce a lot of side effects, including male pattern baldness and an increased chance of developing acne. It would be absurd to say acne was an adaptation favored by natural selection. The same goes for the male edge in spatial ability, Clint and his colleagues argue. They note that when male rats are castrated, they do worse at navigating a maze; when they are given shots of testosterone, they regain their skill. ..."
Dec 22, 2012
Saturday Links
(Like the Kruse Kronicle on Facebook if you want links to daily posts to appear in your Facebook feed.)
1. Several articles I saw this week reflect on data presented in The Pew Forum's The Global Religious Landscape: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World's Major Religious Groups as of 2010. Here is one interesting chart from the survey showing what percentage of each religion's adherents live in minority religious status in their own country.
2. This is really fascinating. Smithsonian: Why Japan is Obsessed with Kentucky Fried Chicken on Christmas. “Kurisumasu ni wa kentakkii!” (Kentucky for Christmas!)
3. Four Harvard and MIT grads are experimenting with direct aid to the poor. "GiveDirectly, the brainchild of four Harvard and MIT graduate students, is so simple, it's genius. Give poor Kenyan families $1,000 -- and let them do whatever they want with it." Can 4 Economists Build the Most Economically Efficient Charity Ever?
4. From the Guardian, Private healthcare: the lessons from Sweden
"... Despite its reputation as a leftwing utopia, Sweden is now a laboratory for rightwing radicalism. Over the past 15 years a coalition of liberals and conservatives has brought in for-profit free schools in education, has sliced welfare to pay off the deficit and has privatised large parts of the health service.
Their success is envied by the centre right in Britain. Despite predictions of doom, Sweden's economy continues to grow and its pro-business coalition has remained in power since 2006. The last election was the first time since the war that a centre-right government had been re-elected after serving a full term.
As the state has been shrunk, the private sector has moved in. Göran Dahlgren, a former head civil servant at the Swedish department of health and a visiting professor at the University of Liverpool, says that "almost all welfare services are now owned by private equity firms". ..."
5. Scott Annan writes in The Future Of Business Is Morality, And The Future Is Now
"... We have reached a point in our economy where it is becoming increasingly clear that businesses are being measured not just for their profit, but also for their impact. And I'm not just talking about writing a check or funding a charity; I'm referring to business models for which community involvement and inspirational brand building are the profit centers. (Think Warby Parker, TOMS, and startups such as SOMA.) I recently went to a conference where the founders of a startup posited a powerful idea: the future of marketing is philanthropy. But I think the even bigger idea is the future of business is morality. My grandfather saw this early on.
At a time when the moral framework of America appears to be fractured – or at the very least confused – businesses are in the propitious position to espouse cultural standards that can help restore values that our youth can use to build the next generation of positive enterprise. In fact, whether businesses succeed in creating and promoting positive cultures might determine whether they stay in business at all. The future of business is morality, and the future is now.
Whether it's the job of the corporation or not to set the moral tone for society, the expectation is trending towards companies setting the right example for others to follow. With the sharp rise in entrepreneurship, young companies have the opportunity to establish strong cultures early on and share them with their communities. Money must have a moral center, and from greater consciousness in business, greater profit will follow. ..."
6. Scientific American asks, After 40 Years, Has Recycling Lived Up to Its Billing?
7. AOL has a short piece about the rise of small nuclear reactors. The Next Big Thing in Nuclear Power: Going Small
8. Scientific American has a list of The Top 10 Science Stories of 2012.
9. Depression Surpasses Asthma as Top Disability Problem among U.S. and Canadian Teens
"New data show an increasing contribution of mental and behavioral disorders to deterioration in the health-related quality of life among teens in the U.S. and Canada over the past two decades, and increases elsewhere around the globe."
10. Robotic arm controlled by the mind allows paraplegic woman to feed herself
11. Interesting piece on Why We Prefer Masculine Voices (Even in Women).
12. Atlantic Cities looks into The Mystery of Our Declining Mobility.
13. People Are Leaving California In Record Numbers
More people moved out of California in 2011 than moved in, according to the latest report from the U.S. Census Bureau, signaling that the Democrat-run state's economic woes continue to drive residents away.
Most statisticians attribute California's net loss of 100,000 people last year to its high cost of living, increased population density and troubling unemployment rate.
The widening middle class in Mexico is also encouraging some immigrants to remain in that country instead of moving to California.
Texas — home to lower taxes, less regulation and what the Manhattan Institute calls a "labor pool with the right skills at the right price" — is one of the most attractive destinations for companies departing from California, according to the Census Bureau. ...
14. The United States Has Seen A Huge Drop In Executions Since 2000.
"The country reported 85 executions in 2000 but only 43 in 2012, according to a new report released by the Death Penalty Information Center. Plus, far fewer people are being sentenced to death row in the first place. The year 2000 saw 224 new inmates sentenced to death, while 2012 saw only 78, according to the report."
15. Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic had a great piece: Why 'If We Can Just Save One Child ...' Is a Bad Argument, referring to President Obama's statement at Newtown, CT. When dealing with complex topics like gun control, we always talk about tradeoffs. For instance, I know how we can save more than 30,000 lives. There were 32,367 traffic fatalities last year. Let's set the speed limit to 5 miles per hour. Nearly all those lives would be saved. Should we do this "if we can save just one more life"? I, like Friedersforf, am not advocating any particular policy. I'm just pointing out the absurdity of making such statements, as politicians often do.
16. The New York Times has an opinion piece by John Dickerson, The Decline of Evangelical America
"I found that the structural supports of evangelicalism are quivering as a result of ground-shaking changes in American culture. Strategies that served evangelicals well just 15 years ago are now self- destructive. The more that evangelicals attempt to correct course, the more they splinter their movement. In coming years we will see the old evangelicalism whimper and wane."
He speaks of an Evangelical "collapse" having happened. That may be a bit premature, but his articulation of trends is right.
17. I saw two interesting posts on the sociology Facebook this week. The New York Times had a piece about announcing bad news on Facebook: On Facebook, Bad With the Good. Mashable reports that Socioeconomic Status Predicts Number of Facebook Friends.
18. Gangnam Style hits one billion views on YouTube. K pop rules!
Dec 14, 2012
Dec 10, 2012
Dec 08, 2012
Saturday Links
Like the Kruse Kronicle on Facebook if you want links to daily posts to appear in your Facebook feed.
Here are this week's Saturday links.
1. To celebrate the Christmas season, Deck the Halls with Macro Follies
2. The Explosion of 15th Century Printing: A Data Visualization
"... Drawing on data from the [Harvard] university's library collections, the animation below maps the number and location of printed works by year. Watch it full screen in HD to see cities light up as the years scroll by in the lower left corner. ..."
3. Drive-through fast food not convenient enough for you? Burger King delivery: A new front in the fast-food wars?
4. a U-shaped happiness curve, consistent across cultures, shows happiness declines from childhood until about our mid-forties and then begins to improve as I grow old. It appears it may hold true in primates as well. Our ability to discount bad news, even when we shouldn't, follows the same U-shaped curve. Our brains and experience are optimal for discerning bad news in middle age. It turns out that ignorance (or maybe denial) truly is bliss. Viewpoint: How happiness changes with age. On a related note, it appears that Elderly Brains Have Trouble Recognizing Untrustworthy Faces.
5. The holiday season is in full swing, and many people falsely believe this is a time of elevated suicide rates. Actually, spring and summer have the highest rates, and Nov - Jan have the lowest. In 2010, July was the highest, and December was the lowest. Holiday suicide myth persists, research says
6. French sperm count 'falls by a third' but still within normal range. Researchers don't seem to know why.
7. The Atlantic has an interesting article on Why Don't Parents Name Their Daughters Mary Anymore? It includes this graph.
"Michael" was in the top 3 names for boys from 1953-2010. It dropped to sixth last year. Want to know how your name ranks for each year since 1880? Go to the Social Security Online's Popular Baby Names. The Baby Name Wizard is also pretty cool.
8. More Dads Buy the Toys, So Barbie, and Stores, Get Makeovers.
"For the first time in Barbie’s more than 50-year history, Mattel is introducing a Barbie construction set that underscores a huge shift in the marketplace. Fathers are doing more of the family shopping just as girls are being encouraged more than ever by hypervigilant parents to play with toys (as boys already do) that develop math and science skills early on.
It’s a combination that not only has Barbie building luxury mansions — they are pink, of course — but Lego promoting a line of pastel construction toys called Friends that is an early Christmas season hit. The Mega Bloks Barbie Build ’n Style line, available next week, has both girls — and their fathers — in mind.
“Once it’s in the home, dads would very much be able to join in this play that otherwise they might feel is not their territory,” said Dr. Maureen O’Brien, a psychologist who consulted on the new Barbie set...."
And this reminds me of last year, or the year before when cooking sets were becoming big with boys. They've been watching Emeril Lagasse on the Food Network. "Bam!" New merchandising angle.
9. Instead of indiscriminately sending kids off to college and saddling them with huge debt, maybe a New push for two-year degrees could be smart move for US, report says.
10. Business Insider lists The 12 Most Corrupt Countries In The World.
11. Love them or hate them, the Koch brothers are intriguing. Many political junkies know of them, but few others seem to know about them. Forbes has an interesting feature article in the most recent issue on the Koch Empire and its influence: Inside The Koch Empire: How The Brothers Plan To Reshape America
12. Is the two-party system fracturing? Coalition Is to Control State Senate as Dissident Democrats Join With Republicans
13. How is this economic recovery different from others? The Scariest Jobs Chart Ever
14. "Data-driven healthcare won't replace physicians entirely, but it will help those receptive to technology perform their jobs better." Technology will replace 80% of what doctors do
15. Another bright idea. New plastic lighting saves energy. Goodbye, fluorescent lights?
"Scientists have designed an energy-efficient light of plastic packed with nanomaterials that glow. The shatterproof FIPEL technology can be molded into almost any shape, but still needs to prove it's commercially viable."
16. Yet another good story about the rise of vertical farming. Salad in the sky: The rise of the vertical farm?
17. The Conservation Law Center has an interesting piece about the potential changes nanotechnology will bring to the use of resources and the economy. Nanotechnology: The Potential to Make Every Industry Sustainable
"... Last month, at the first ever conference of the Sustainable Nanotechnology Organization in Washington DC, Michail Roco of the National Science Foundation, and architect of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative provided a response. He said, “every industrial sector is unsustainable…and nanotechnology holds the promise of making every one of them sustainable.”
It’s my belief that that is true: nanotechnology, or the ability to manipulate matter at a scale of one billionth of a meter, has far-reaching implications for the improvement of sustainable technology, industry and society.
Already, it is being used widely to enable more sustainable practices. Safer manufacturing, less waste generation, reusable materials, more efficient energy technologies, better water purification, lower toxicity and environmental impacts from chemotherapy agents to marine paints are all current applications of nanotechnology. There is no reason for this technology to develop in an unsustainable manner.
In the past, a lack of foresight has resulted in costs to society – people, businesses, and governments, and— that could have been avoided by proactive efforts to manage risks. Today, the tools to develop safer technologies and less harmful products exist. Let us not miss this opportunity. ..."
18. The American Enterprise Institute has an interesting summary of a Nielson report about social media usage. 8 fun facts about the incredible rise of social media
19. Death On Facebook Now Common As 'Dead Profiles' Create Vast Virtual Cemetery
"It used be that news of death spread through phone calls, and before that, letters and house calls. The departed were publicly remembered via memorials on street corners, newspaper obituaries and flowers at grave sites. To some degree, this is still the case. But increasingly, the announcements and subsequent mourning occur on social media. Facebook, with 1 billion detailed, self-submitted user profiles, was created to connect the living. But it has become the world's largest site of memorials for the dead."
20. From the "That's just not right!" file. Harvard Economics Department does their version of "Call me maybe."
Dec 04, 2012
Dec 03, 2012
Nov 17, 2012
Saturday Links
Here are the links for this week. Lots of interesting finds this week, and not nearly enough time to blog.
1. Google Fiber offers super-fast broadband to Kansas City. If all goes well, we will get connected in late spring of 2013.
2. Two Thirds of Ocean Life Remains Undiscovered. If they haven't found them, how do they know?
3. "British people - and many others across the world - have been brought up on the idea of three square meals a day as a normal eating pattern, but it wasn't always that way." Breakfast, lunch and dinner: Have we always eaten them?
4. What is the optimal rate of taxation according to the Laffer Curve? Goats hold the answer. Goat Economics: Why the Laffer Curve Is No Joke
5. The print media industry is rapidly morphing right before our eyes. Google Ad Revenue Now More Than U.S. Print Publications Combined [CHART]
6. Cyberspace continues to evolve. Text Messaging Declines in U.S. for First Time, Report Says
7. "It's a common grumble that politicians' lifestyles are far removed from those of their electorate. Not so in Uruguay. Meet the president - who lives on a ramshackle farm and gives away most of his pay." Jose Mujica: The world's 'poorest' president
8. You may have heard that there was a presidential election last week. Here is a map showing how the counties voted, with red being the most intensely Republican and blue being the most Democrat. (Source: The Real Reason Cities Lean Democratic)
9. Speaking of the election, a lot has been written about how the GOP will need to change if they want to win national elections. As a right-leaning guy, I thought this article in Slate, The New Grand Old Party, and Bobby Jindal's article, How Republicans can win future elections, were among the best.
10. China continues working on technological innovations to address its water problems. Industry Special: Desalination tech helps slake nation's thirst for fresh water.
11. The world is going to the dogs. The Dog Economy Is Global—but What Is the World's True Canine Capital?
12. As manufacturing becomes more automated, requiring fewer workers, we see The Emerging Professional, Scientific, and Technical Sector.
13. Nanotechnology just keeps getting more impressive. "The latest invention from Stanford University's Department of Electrical Engineering sounds like something a superhero would have. A self-repairing plastic-metal material has been developed by a team of professors, researchers and graduate students." New Self-Repairing Material Invented at Stanford
14. For the true narcissist, you now can replicate your image in 3D. 3D-printing photo booth gives you a figurine instead of a bad photo
15. Speaking of 3D-Printing, how big a deal is it? "Chris Anderson has exited one of the top jobs in publishing - Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine - to pursue the life of an entrepreneur, making a big bet that 3D printers represent a massive new phase of the industrial revolution." Chris Anderson: Why I left Wired - 3D Printing Will Be Bigger Than The Web
16. The debate about a historical Adam continues. Peter Enns with another interesting post, Who Needs a Historical Prometheus…uh, I mean Adam?
17. George Bullard asks, When is a Church a Church, and When is it a Flash Mob?
"A flash mob (or flashmob) is a group of people who assemble suddenly in a place, perform an unusual and seemingly pointless act for a brief time, then disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment, satire, and artistic expression. Flash mobs are organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails." [Wikipedia accessed 11.12.12] How do you define a church?"
18. This was me thirty years ago (in my dreams!)
19. Ever wonder how Cy Young award-winning pitcher R. A. Dickey manages to throw knuckleballs? Apparently, so do physicists. How a Baseball Star's Tricky Pitch Strikes Out Hitters—and Baffles Physicists
20. I loved these stat brain teasers. 5 Statistics Problems That Will Change The Way You See The World
Nov 13, 2012
Nov 10, 2012
Nov 02, 2012
The Definitive-ish Guide for Using Social Media in the Church - Book Review
How can my Church effectively use social media? Which social media services should my Church use? Aren’t we opening our congregation to abuse if we venture into social media?
I’ve been blogging for seven years, and because of that, I frequently get questions like these from pastors and congregation leaders. I can offer some help, but social media can be used in many creative ways. I’ve never focused on social media’s application for a congregation, so my input has always been incomplete. But now I have definitive-ish solution, or at least a starting place, for congregations that want to engage with social media fully.
Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow wrote a book, The Definitive-ish Guide for Using Social Media in the Church, earlier this year. Bruce was a church planter and a pastor. He is also a past moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA). But most importantly, Bruce has been an avid social media user as a pastor in the congregational setting.
The book begins with Bruce highlighting cultural shifts that have reshaped how we communicate and connect. He writes about the spirituality of social media and the inherent dangers, offering insights on navigating this new world.
As a starting place, Bruce recommends five social media tools:
- Blogging
- Google Docs
- Yelp
- Dropbox
I use all five of these. Maybe you do too. But what was helpful for me was Bruce showing particular ways these tools can be helpful in the life of a congregation. He raised several ideas I hadn’t given much consideration. For instance, I use Yelp to look up stuff all the time. What are people saying about your congregation at Yelp? Have you encouraged people in your congregation to write a review so people who want to know about your congregation can get a flavor of what you are about? My congregation has one review. I’m going to work on that. In a later chapter, for the more adventurous souls, Bruce briefly explores several other social media tools like Twitter, YouTube, Goodreads, and Instagram.
Near the end of the book, Bruce offers some very helpful advice for pastors. You have been a congregation pastor for several years and now have taken a new call. In the PCUSA world, you are expected to severe pastoral relationships with your congregation so there is no confusion for the new pastor. But you are now Facebook friends with half your congregation and a member of groups the congregation has formed through social media. How do you manage this transition? I think Bruce offers some very helpful advice. He has had to live this himself.
Finally, Bruce closes out with a frequently asked questions chapter. He invites his readers to jump in and communicate what they learn along the way. He has an appendix that offers some practical help. The book is only available (I believe) in electronic format. That will allow Bruce to update the book easily as social media evolves. He tells me he is already working on a second edition.
This book is just awesome! If your congregation has been resisting social media, I’d encourage you to read this book. Even if your congregation has already been using social media, I think you will find tips and ideas you may not have considered. It is a relatively short book written in a very engaging style. I now feel like I have a tool I can give to others to help get them started. I recommend you get a copy today.
Oct 29, 2012
Surmounting the Insurmountable: Wikipedia Is Nearing Completion, in a Sense
Atlantic: Surmounting the Insurmountable: Wikipedia Is Nearing Completion, in a Sense
And that's something of a challenge for the collaborative encyclopedia going forward
For about the last five years, Wikipedia has had trouble getting and keeping new volunteer editors. The foundation behind Wikipedia has made building up the editor base a major goal, and is attacking it from all angles, such as encouraging a culture that is friendlier to newbies, creating an easier sign-up page, and making the editing process more intutitive.
But what if the decline in engagement has little to do with culture or the design of the site? What if, instead, it's that there's just less for new Wikipedians to do?
It may seem impossible for an encyclopedia of everything to ever near completion, but at least for the major articles on topics like big wars, important historical figures, central scientific concepts, the English-language Wikipedia's pretty well filled out. (There is, of course, room for improvement in articles that have received less attention, but that is a different, yet still very important, set of challenges.) There's always going to be some tidying -- better citations, small updates, new links, cleaner formatting -- but the bulk of the work, the actual writing and structuring of the articles, has already been done. "There are more and more readers of Wikipedia, but they have less and less new to add," writes historian and Wikipedia editor Richard Jensen in the latest issue of The Journal of Military History. ...
This graph says a thousand words:
Oct 27, 2012
Saturday Links
I spend considerable time scanning headlines each week as I look for stories to blog about at the Kruse Kronicle. I clip them into an Evernote Notebook and usually twice a day, I select one or two to link and discuss. Several interesting stories never make it onto the blog.
So this week, I'm beginning what I hope will be a regular Saturday feature. Each Saturday, I will post links I did not use the previous week. For now, I will call it "Saturday Links." Happy clicking!
1. Interesting video intro to Gen IV Nuclear Power at the Catalyst: Next Generation Nuclear Power
2. BBC L'Aquila quake: Italy scientists guilty of manslaughter. Scientists found guilty of bad predictions about an earthquake. That will put a chill in the scientific community.
3. Icon of the American Libertarian movement, Murray Rothbard, once asked, "Why won't the left acknowledge the difference between deserving poor and undeserving poor? Why support the feckless, lazy & irresponsible?" Chris Dillow gives a libertarian response affirming the need to support the undeserving poor.
4. I love historical restoration. The Atlantic has a great piece, Scientists Recover the Sounds of 19th-Century Music and Laughter From the Oldest Playable American Recording, about how scientists have restored a phonograph recording made in 1878 in St. Louis.
5. Chronicle of Philanthropy says Most Donors Plan to Give as Much or More in 2012, Survey Finds.
6. How did those Easter Island statues get into place? California State University archaeologists think they have the answer. See Easter Island Statues Could Have 'Walked' Into Positions in Wired. Here is the YouTube clip:
So where did they get the rope?
7. Think you "bought" a book for your Kindle? Gizmodo says think again: You Don't Own the Books on Your Kindle.
8. BBC has a report on the stuff people are printing with 3D printers:
But then there is also The Dark Side of 3D Printing.
9. Bryan Caplan explains that the rate of executions per capita in the U. S. has been in monotonic decline over the nation's history: U.S. Executions Per Capita Have Been Falling for 400 Years.
He writes:
"I can easily imagine my graph in a Julian Simon or Steven Pinker chapter on human progress and the decline in violence. Even though I have no philosophical objection to the death penalty, it's hard not to interpret this 400-year pattern as a strong sign of human betterment."
10. Mark Roberts has a great piece about cross-generational misunderstandings using social media: Living in the Brave New World of Social Media: Posting a Death on Facebook
11. American Association of University Women (AAUW) says pay inequity begins right out of college: Does gender pay gap exist? Right out of college, says new study. But Elizabeth Dwoskin says "not so fast" on attributing this all to discrimination: Why Women Earn Less Than Men a Year Out of School.
12. Wildcat football rising! Kansas State moves up to No. 3 EMAW!
13. Sporting KC finishes first place in East with 2-1 win over Philadelphia Union. Awesome!
Oct 17, 2012
Oct 16, 2012
Oct 04, 2012
Oct 02, 2012
Aug 30, 2012
Aug 27, 2012
Aug 10, 2012
Jul 09, 2012
Map of the Day: Soda vs. Pop vs. Coke
Atlantic City: Map of the Day: Soda vs. Pop vs. Coke
The map above is the latest play on the old "pop" vs. "soda" map of the United States. Edwin Chen, a data scientist at Twitter who conducted math and linguistics research at MIT, compiled tweets that used either "coke," "soda," or "pop" when describing a soft drink. The red on the map shows places where "coke" is more prevalently tweeted, green indicates "pop," and blue is for "soda." Chen describes his method for organizing, cleaning, and aggregating the data: ...
May 31, 2012
May 02, 2012
Apr 18, 2012
Apr 16, 2012
Apr 13, 2012
Mar 14, 2012
Social networking sites and politics
Pew Internet: Social networking sites and politics
Here are some interesting graphs about how liberals, moderates, and conservatives deal with the political differences they encounter on social networking sites (SNS). Seems liberals and conservatives or more likely than moderates to discover a friend has different political views than they expected. Liberals are a little more likely than moderates or conservatives to drop or block someone they disagree with. The more to the extremes you are, the more likely you are to say that you agree with most posts by your friends, suggesting the presence of echo chambers.
I've never dropped a FB friend over political issues. I have dropped several Twitter feeds from people (from both sides of the spectrum) who continually tweet snarky political comments, and I've moved FB friends to categories in my feed where I see them less often. I enjoy discussing politics, but echo chamber snarkiness is wearisome no matter which perspective it comes from.
Mar 13, 2012
Mar 06, 2012
Mar 02, 2012
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