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2013-05-07 21:38:14 (9 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Our 14 year old has a vocab list from his English class.  It defines "notoriety" as "fame," and has the sample sentence: "With notoriety comes the responsibility to be a good role model, because many children look up to famous people."

2013-05-06 00:14:35 (0 comments, 4 reshares, 4 +1s)

Some stunning high-speed photographs of waves.  They're all worth clicking through; my favorite may be number 7 in the "multiwave" series.

2013-04-30 20:40:58 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

We've got a senate primary today -- yay Massachusetts: 4 senate elections in 3 years.  I just got a poll phone call that asked me if I intended to vote in the primary, what issue was most important in my choice of who to support, and if I knew what the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution are called. (She very politely told the that I got that one right.) Oh, and what year I was born in. Notice that they never asked who I was voting for.  ?!?!?

2013-03-01 17:25:40 (2 comments, 4 reshares, 2 +1s)

No, Massachusetts doesn't have the worst black/white gap in voter turnout, despite what Roberts claimed at the Supreme Court yesterday.  TL;DR version:  the study has huge margin of errors, and you still only get this result if you look at the numbers based on the whole population, not just citizens.  (And cherry-picked, invalid, politically motivated statistics make me cranky.)


The only decent data on the subject comes from the Census Bureau's Current Population Study.  In that study, many states (including MA) have double-digit margin of errors for black turnout, and a quarter have no statistically valid data at all.  Basically, the turnout data for states with relatively small black populations are extremely unreliable. Even given all that, several states have turnout gaps as large as MA's.

The only way you can support the claim about MA is looking at voterturn... more »

2012-12-19 19:23:07 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

This four-page, fold-out car ad showed up in the most recent New Yorker, and I don't get it at all.  The caption on the first image says "Statistically speaking, they're all the same person," and the next page says "(But we're not about statistics.)"  So, people (red-heads?) aren't all the same? Even though they, um,  don't look at all the same from the back either?  Because -- statistics can't tell age/gender/race apart?  And so -- cars?

(Back to grading...)

2012-12-18 20:59:55 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

The University of Chicago admissions office received a somewhat mysterious package, and hoped the internet could help them figure out what happened -- the resolution is linked at the end of the post:

2012-11-14 15:52:32 (11 comments, 5 reshares, 9 +1s)

This picture, made by Chris Howard at http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151321923986667&set=a.53699096666.80512.605431666&type=1&theater, is a great election map.  It combines the "purple America" idea of fading counties between red and blue to indicate the vote with saturation used to indicate the total number of votes (so population density).   It's a lot easier to interpret than the cartogram version that distort the map proportionally to populations, while still showing where people actually live.

2012-11-13 17:45:30 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

The New York Times "newsroom notes" column did a roundup of recent numerical corrections in the paper.  One of them serves as a reminder of just how innumerate smart people can be: 

An article on Monday about the popularity of carwashes as a fundraising tool for various causes in Phoenix misstated the number of cars per capita. There are about 600 cars for every 1,000 residents, according to the Department of Energy, not one car for every 600 residents.

According to the column, the editor questioned the statistic, but the reported replied by confirming the original statistic.  How can any adult in the US think that it's remotely possible to have 1 car for every 600 adults -- even when given a second chance to think it over?  (And the editor accepted the "confirmation".  Sigh.)

The other corrections provide examples of two off the greatesthits... more »

2012-11-11 15:50:12 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

How do the vote for Obama and the vote for Warren compare in Massachusetts, town by town?  

It looks like a almost perfect correlation (r=0.98), with a slope of virtually 1 (1.047). Elizabeth Warren, pretty much, gets  about 9 percentage points fewer voters than Obama (y-intercept of -.11).  Except: see that outlier in the lower right hand corner?  That's Bellingham; it looks like it voted overwhelmingly for Obama and moderately for Brown.  What happened there?

All the news sites I found that are reporting state-wide election results -- the Boston Globe's web site, WHDH 7 news, Channel 5 news -- have Bellingham reporting 4,256  votes for Obama, 1,119 for Brown.  (They're all using the same AP numbers, I believe.)  But the town website has a PDF of election results that lists 4,119 for Brown.  Making that change brings Bellingham right in line with the restof the st... more »

2012-11-11 01:42:30 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

+Jordan Ellenberg  asked "Younger people vote more Democratic than older people, and lower-income people vote more Democratic than higher-income people.  Are these two effects distinct from each other?  Or if you fix an income level, do young and old people at that income level vote the same way?"  I played around with 2008 election survey data -- not the exit polls but the ANES survey  -- (http://www.electionstudies.org/studypages/2008prepost/2008prepost.htm)  and found that even with income levels fixed, younger and older people voted differently.  

Of people making under $30k, 68% of under-30-years olds, 67% of 30-44 year olds, 57% of 45-64 year olds, and 51.5% of 65+ voted for Obama.  

For people making  $50-$100k, 54% of under-30-years olds, 48.5% of 30-44 year olds, 44% of 45-64 year olds, and 27% of 65+ voted for Obama. 

The graphs and charts areattached;... more »

2012-11-09 16:31:59 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

This short video is Obama thanking his campaign workers. He appears to be speaking spontaneously and unscripted, with real emotion. It's worth a listen; he's an eloquent man, in some ways more so without the speech writers and need to worry about message testing.

2012-11-08 14:43:05 (5 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

The New York Times graphics department is absolutely brilliant, yet again.  This image shows the demographic voting patterns and shifts from 2004 to 2008 to 2012, creatively and clearly.

(30-44 year olds were one of the few demographics to vote more Dem in this election than 4 years ago, according to the exit poling.)

2012-10-29 12:49:36 (6 comments, 28 reshares, 10 +1s)

Watch numbers dance their way through prime factorization patterns:

2012-10-15 12:46:09 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

Very cool data and presentation -- they've mapped the solar energy potential of all the Cambridge (MA) buildings to 1 meter resolution (!), and provide quite a bit of data for every building on the cost and impact of installing solar panels.

2012-10-13 12:12:10 (7 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

Those who understand Venn diagrams, and those who do not?

2012-10-03 17:57:56 (14 comments, 3 reshares, 3 +1s)

This graphic is completely mystifying me.  I'd consider using it in class -- I love bad examples -- if I could figure out what the designer had in mind.  (Notice that even the heights of the dark red bars don't make sense -- compare the 42% on the right to the 52% for marital status.)  Any idea at all?

2012-10-03 17:38:47 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 4 +1s)

Stunning pictures and a great unanswered question:

2012-09-24 18:37:30 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Zero-gravity yo-yo tricks -- fascinating thinking about momentum effects without gravity being in the picture.

2012-08-30 16:26:58 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

Harry Lewis's account of how he designed a discrete-math-for-CS course that involved "flipping the classroom" is worth reading. Students had to watch a 20-minute video lecture and do some reading before class.  Class attendance, in which students worked in small (randomly assigned!) groups on relevant problems, was mandatory and ungraded, and followed up by daily homework problems

2012-08-29 12:15:48 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

Amazing photos:

2012-08-25 22:03:13 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

RIP, Neil Armstong

2012-08-10 18:18:20 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Compare the box-office trends for "Twilight" and "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and you see two very different patterns: big opening weekend with a drop-off after that ("exogenous"), versus slow word-of-mouth spread causing the movie to pick up over time ("endogenous").  After this comarison, the article looks at the spread of two girls' names, Madison and Isabella.

The graphs would be a nice way to introduce the concepts of rate-of-change and concavity; I'd like to see how students describe the difference between these two movies.

The discussion and examples come from a new book, Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us, by Gabriel Rossman, which I'm going to look for.

2012-07-19 21:47:23 (3 comments, 11 reshares, 5 +1s)

The improved graph shows the effect of the competing tax plans, but the axis, instead of being $ income, is %ile of income -- effectively scaling the width of the bars on the original graph by the number of people in each group.  The resulting graph give a much clearer picture of incomes and the tax effects, and provides a striking lesson in the advantages to be gained by thinking about alternative axes when making even a "simple" bar chart.

2012-07-13 02:49:02 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

Wow!  Click through to look at Gabriel Dawe's installation art -- wonderful colors and shapes all made out of sewing thread.

2012-07-02 19:50:05 (5 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

Have handful of interesting recent studies:
1) "Girlie" images of scientists turn middle school girls off from science more than "non-girlied" women scientists: 
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2012/06/girlie-scientist-role-models-could-do.html
I have more thoughts that I know what to do with about this study, but it's been rattling around in my head for a couple of weeks now.  I'd like to see a distinction between an emphasis on girlie topics and incidental appearance, but that's more complicated that this study got into:
"Some of the girls read about three female students who were successful in STEM subjects and were also overtly "girlie" (e.g. they wore make up and pink clothes, and liked reading fashion magazines). For schoolgirls who said they had little interest in science subjects, reading about these kind of role modelsa... more »

2012-06-30 21:24:38 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

2012-06-14 19:35:34 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

This op-ed proposes a different way of funding college:  rather than loans, the funders (investors?) would receive an agreed-upon fraction of the student's future income -- or perhaps of income over the median high school degree holder's income -- collected by the IRS.  (Apparently, Australia's had a system like this since the 80s, and Yale tried one briefly).  

There are some obvious issues: how would post-grad degrees be funded, and would the "borrower" be required to pay a fraction of all income to both undergrad and graduate school funders, or some division based on the presumed value added by the post-graduate degree?  How would this work for people whose income is more complicated that the typical salary model?  The line between salary income and investment income is messy, and taxes are generally based on household income, not individual.  I'm not atall c... more »

2012-06-14 13:58:01 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Here's a graph of birthday frequency, based on number of births and not just rank.  The drops for the the big holidays -- New Years, 4th of July, and Christmas -- are huge, and there's a late-November dip that's got to be Thanksgiving related, averaged out over the 19 years of data. 

2012-06-05 22:41:21 (2 comments, 2 reshares, 7 +1s)

Michael Lorton writes: 
Norway is now planning to separate the Protestant Lutheran Church from the government. I am serenely indifferent to this fact.

I [am] devastated, utterly gutted, however, that the news coverage of this event did not include any mention of the politicians who opposed the step. My God, just think of it:
"MPs Olaf Lundteigen, Christina Ramsøy, and Kjersti Toppe, all of the Centre Party, voted against the bill. ‘The Lutheran Church should always remain part of the Norwegian state,’ Ms Toppe said antidisestablishmentarianistically."

2012-06-04 18:07:27 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

The NYTimes ran an article over the weekend about a sexual harassment lawsuit being filed agains a Silicon Valley VC firm
which I read and grumbled about.  

Think about this quote from the article: (from David A. Kaplan, who wrote Silicon Boys) "You don’t really hear about randiness and mistreatment of women. That doesn’t prove it’s not there, but that’s not the lore.”  Doesn't that depend on who "you" are?  If you spoke with the women of Silicon Valley, you may well hear a different story.

It's frustrating because the article makes some good and important points:
"Her complaint goes further. It depicts venture capitalists here as a group of 21st-century men who may be hard at work building the 22nd century but, when it comes to dealing with women in the workplace, are stuck firmly in the caveman era — or at least in the 1950s.It’s a portrait t... more »

2012-05-31 15:14:25 (2 comments, 5 reshares, 6 +1s)

Wow!

2012-05-25 01:40:17 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Pictures of people are hard to recognize when they're turned upside down, but pictures of objects aren't. According to this study, pictures of scantily clad women are processed like objects, whereas men are processed like people. They really mean it when they say "objectification".

2012-05-17 00:57:36 (8 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Cool chart. (The complete data is available here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/business/20leonhardt-table.html)

2012-05-15 12:19:33 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Here's some data from the Pew research center on the reaction to Obama's announcement; click through for a table breaking out different subgroups. The age difference isn't anywhere near as large as I would have expected -- in fact, 18-29 year olds and 30-49 year olds were equally likely to say that they feel "more favorably" as a result, although 18-29 year olds were more likely to say "had no effect." (It's worth noticing -- see p. 2 -- that the margin of error is quite large for some of these. Unlike most other polling organizations, Pew provides methodological details, including subgroup margins of error.)

Gallup did a similar poll, asking instead whether the decision makes you more or less likely to vote for him, or makes no difference:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/154628/Six-Say-Obama-Sex-Marriage-View-Won-Sway-Vote.aspx

Notice that the... more »

2012-05-10 18:51:26 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Here's an interesting chart from Twitter (http://twitter.com/#!/gov/status/200626614135042048/photo/1) showing the number of gay-marriage-related tweets per day. Unsurprisingly, the big peak came yesterday, but if you look at the rate -- tweets per million, in grey -- the topic was actually no more popular yesterday than when New York passed their marriage equality law (and Twitter usage has roughly doubled in the last year).

2012-05-08 15:28:24 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

And he sailed off through night and day
and in and out of weeks
and almost over a year
to where the wild things are.

2012-05-02 14:24:14 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

I just tripped over this headline (without the summary) and had no idea what it meant.

Language Log calls these "crash blossoms"; here's their archive of more: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=118

2012-04-26 12:43:32 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 2 +1s)

Great photos! He drops porcelain figures on the ground, and photographs them just as they shatter.

2012-04-09 23:49:33 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Our president has clearly done his share of bedtime reading.

2012-04-03 15:47:02 (11 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

Rant of the day: why do we have the algebra curriculum we do, as the first non-arithmetic math course people take? Specifically, why the emphasis on polynomials and quadratics?

I absolutely see the value in learning the two paired ideas that a variable introduces: the parameter (f(x) as a function of x) and the unknown to be solved for. Linear equations are great, because they provide a clear translation of a real-world situation into the language of algebra. The steps involved in solving a linear equation mean something concrete. But why the quadratic? Why multiplying linear terms with the distributive law, factoring quadratics, the quadratic equation? The quadratic really comes into its own with physics and basic calculus, but we can't (don'?) teach 8th grades how to move from the acceleration due to gravity to the formula for a falling object. Can you come up with a naturally... more »

2012-04-02 03:25:00 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

(Check the date.)

2012-04-02 02:51:18 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

Earlier this year, I told my 13 year old that programming was probably the most valuable (academic) skill he could learn that he wouldn't necessarily be taught in school.

This article raises interesting questions: should computational thinking be part of the educational "canon," along with reading, writing, and arithmetic, and if so, what should be taught?

I expect if we'd see more women in computer-oriented STEM fields if "computational thinking" were a core secondary school subject, and not an elective that only "geeky" kids (primarily boys) take.

2012-03-28 20:34:33 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

A beautiful live wind map

2012-03-26 14:33:48 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

The attempt to get a pardon for Turing bothered me because it focused only on this one prominent victim of the law. He shouldn't be pardoned because he was brilliant and incredibly valuable to war effort; he and every other person convicted of "moral turpitude" for being gay should be pardoned because the law was something we now recognize as a horrid abuse of civil rights.

That said, this petition is great. It is apparently official, in some way: getting 100,000 signatures makes it "eligible" for debate in the House of Commons, which could lead to it becoming law. (I think I'm glad we don't have similar official petitions in the US; I shudder to imagine what would end up making it to Congress if we did.)

2012-03-17 21:08:45 (11 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

I have never understood why capital gains should be taxed at a lower rate than income. Why do I pay more on the money I work for than on the money I make by investing it?

2012-03-12 14:31:33 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Wow. For middle-class California residents, state schools are now more expensive than some of the top private schools. That's partly because some of the wealthy private schools have made some major efforts to reduce costs and loan burdens; good for them.

"Consider a family of four -- married parents, a high-school senior and a 14-year-old child -- making $130,000 a year.
With typical aid, the family should expect to pay nearly $24,000 for a Cal State freshman's tuition, on-campus room and board, supplies and other expenses. At Harvard? Just $17,000, even though its stated annual tuition is $36,305.
The same family would pay about $33,000 for a freshman year at UC Santa Cruz.

UC Berkeley, which recently followed the lead of private colleges by boosting aid for middle-class families, would cost $19,500."

2012-03-12 13:00:20 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

The next entry in the long-running ongoing series, "journalists can't do math":


In 2011, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) [...] euthanized the overwhelming majority of dogs and cats that it accepted into its shelters. Out of 760 dogs impounded, they killed 713, arranged for 19 to be adopted, and farmed out 36 to other shelters (not necessarily "no kill" ones). As for cats, they impounded 1,211, euthanized 1,198, transferred eight, and found homes for a grand total of five. [...]

Even acknowledging that PETA sterilized over 10,500 dogs and cats and returned them to their owners, it doesn't change the fact that its adoption rate in 2011 was 0.025 percent for dogs and 0.004 for cats.

Oh yes it does. The dog adoption rate is 2.5%, not 0.025%.

2012-03-09 21:09:34 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

These pictures are both charming and odd -- and look like they'd be great inspiration for steampunk costuming. I wish I knew more about the cultural context. Were they meant to seem totally absurd -- "just imagine, first the suffragettes, next women lawyers"? Are they the 100-year-old equivalent of those horrid "hot doctor/judge/whatever" hallowe'en costumes?

2012-03-09 21:02:03 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Huh. Looks like the Sandra Fluke fiasco may actually hurt Limbaugh:

"A total of 86 ads aired during WABC's broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show today. [Thurs, March 8]
77 of those ads were public service announcements donated free of charge by the Ad Council.
Of the nine paid spots that ran, seven were from companies that have said they have taken steps to ensure their ads no longer air during the program.
WABC's online feed included about 5:33 of dead air when ads would normally have run."

2012-03-01 22:27:45 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

The 13 year old just showed me the following problem from his algebra assignment: solve the equation e = m c^2 for c.

He observed that this is a ridiculous thing to ask, since c is the most universal of all constants. Would the answer c = 299792458 meters per second be acceptable?

(His math teacher said that he could give that answer only if he also solved the equation in the spirit which the problem intended.)