Inforgraphic of the day

This is just cool:

Chart of the day

Thought this Atlantic piece on the price of used televisions was really interesting.  Basically, people way over-price their used TV’s on Craig’s List because they price relative to what they paid for them while the price of TV’s is always dropping.  To wit:

My first thought?  Wow– I need to buy a 32″ LCD!  I already have one, but still, damn that’s cheap!  Of course, if I were to sell my existing it would be for decidedly less than the $400+ I paid in January ’09.

Milk Machine

I don’t have much to comment on the matter, but I found this Atlantic piece on how sophisticated quantitive analysis and subsequent breeding has turned the modern dairy cow into a super-producing milk machine to be really fascinating.  Some tidbits:

Data-driven predictions are responsible for a massive transformation of America’s dairy cows. While other industries are just catching on to this whole “big data” thing, the animal sciences — and dairy breeding in particular — have been using large amounts of datasince long before VanRaden was calculating the outsized genetic impact of the most sought-after bulls with a pencil and paper in the 1980s.

Dairy breeding is perfect for quantitative analysis.Pedigree records have been assiduously kept;relatively easy artificial insemination has helped centralized genetic information in a small number of key bulls since the 1960s; there are a relatively small and easily measurable number of traits – milk production, fat in the milk, protein in the milk, longevity, udder quality — that breeders want to optimize; each cow works for three or four years, which means that farmers invest thousands of dollars into each animal, so it’s worth it to get the best semen money can buy. The economics push breeders to use the genetics.

The bull market (heh) can be reduced to one key statistic, lifetime net merit, though there are many nuances that the single number cannot capture. Net merit denotes the likely additive value of a bull’s genetics. The number is actually denominated in dollars because it is an estimate of how much a bull’s genetic material will likely improve the revenue from a given cow. A very complicated equation weights all of the factors that go into dairy breeding and — voila — you come out with this single number. For example, a bull that could help a cow make an extra 1000 pounds of milk over her lifetime only gets an increase of $1 in net merit while a bull who will help that same cow produce a pound more protein will get $3.41 more in net merit. An increase of a single month of predicted productive life yields $35 more.

I always tell those pursuing PhD’s in Political Science to really learn their statistics because even if they cannot land a tenure track job, there’s all kinds of avenues open to them with a strong statistical background.  Little did I realize that it could be useful for putting them into the dairy farming world.  Honestly, that kind of number crunching sounds like a lot of fun to me.  But, I think I’ll stick with data on American public opinion.

The third annual Fully Myelinated Reader Survey!

Well, just what you’ve been waiting for.  Please take this survey and help me.  My readership has grown a lot (thanks!!) in the past year and I’d really, really like to know more about my audience.  I write this blog for me because I find it very rewarding to do so, but I would not be writing it if there’s weren’t people out there reading it and I’d really like to know more about my readers so that I can definitely take into account your backgrounds and interests as I decide what’s worth blogging about.  It’s a short survey– so, pretty please!

[Also, if you catch any problems/errors, please let me know.]

Ad of the year

Okay, I had this in the blog just a few months ago, but now that it has been deemed ad of the year, seemed like a good excuse to include it again (it is awesome).   And check out Seth Stevenson’s rundown on this year’s Clio awards.

Their’s not enough comments

I’m sure when John F. posted this to FB, he knew he’d see it here:

Of course in my case the key is to just do a post about global warming to gin up comments.

Blowing stuff up really slowly

Okay, this is super cool.  I know my boys are going to love watching this.  From a Danish TV show which translates as “Stupid and Dangerous.”  Reminds me of some of my teenage exploits, though these are on a much grander scale (via Atlantic):

Historical myths

Ezra Klein linked to this blog post on 5 historical misconceptions.   That’s right, Vikings did not actually wear pointy helmets.  Would’ve been a bad idea:

What would a Viking be without his trusty battle helmet and its impressive horns? The answer is: a more historically accurate viking.

Think, for a moment about wearing headgear like that into battle: the horns are just easy targets for your opponent to hit and knock off your helmet.

Or, if you strap on your helmet, now your opponent has a convenient lever with which to drag you to the ground and something to hold onto while slitting your throat.

Horned helmets are a terrible idea, which is why archeologists have never found them at viking battle sites and there’s no evidence that they were ever used.

Given that my son David and I just had an extended conversation about the inherent difficulties of countries using different measurement systems, my favorite was the explanation of Napoleon’s presumed small stature:

Famously this tiny, tiny general – perhaps to compensate for his short stature – took control of France greatly expanded its influence and dubbed himself emperor.

Napoleon’s official height was indeed 5 foot 2 inches but at the time French inches were longer than English inches, so doing the unit conversion, Napoleon’s height should have been reported as 5’7 in England’s imperial units – which is short by today’s standard but was average or slightly above average in the early 1800s.

 

Gated communities

Interesting piece in the Post about how the psychology of gated communities may have contributed to the Trayvon Martin shooting:

On the night he was shot, Trayvon Martin walked through an area that he may have thought was public territory. George Zimmerman, on the other hand, saw “a real suspicious guy” walking into what he probably perceived as his private domain. Because the Retreat at Twin Lakes, where the girlfriend of Martin’s father lives, is surrounded by gates with controlled access, the community is not quite public and not quite private space.

Gates convey to those living behind them that their “home” extends all the way to the walls surrounding the compound. Because streets and parks are accessible only to those living within the community, they begin to feel more like private living rooms and are defended fiercely against intruders. When gates blur public and private spaces in this way, these communities can become dangerous for the people inside and outside them — and dangerous for the nation’s ideal of equality among its people.

Sounds good to me.  My sister lives in a gated community and I hate it.  Does stopping a minivan with two parents and four kids in it to see the driver’s ID before letting them in really make the community any safer?  And does it need to be any safer when it is out in the exurbs literally dozens of miles (and no connecting public transit) from any areas that have any crime problems at all?  And is it any safer than it would otherwise be?  Apparently, no:

Proponents of gated communities often say they are safe, neighborly places. But according to my research and that of local police departments across the country, gated communities do not have less crime than the suburbs from which they’re walled off. (One exception is car theft, which my research with Mary Gail Snyder found to be less frequent in gated communities than in non-gated ones.) We also found that residents of gated developments don’t know their neighbors any better than people in other suburban communities.

The article goes into more downsides– especially about our notions of shared values and democracy– but I’m happy enough with the complaints above.

On work-life balance

Friend of mine (who manages to work very hard and still be a very good dad– far as I can tell)k posted this on Facebook:

Successful career women are almost always — perhaps even literally always — asked in interviews how they deal with the infamous “the work/life balance.” Women who haven’t married or had children are quizzed on why they haven’t — can their withering wombs be chalked up to a heavy workload? — and women who do achieve the mythical “balance” are forced to describe, over and over again, how they’ve possibly managed such a feat. Men, on the other hand, are rarely asked how they balance family time with work…

So kudos to Amanda Steinberg, founder and CEO of DailyWorth, a successful online finance community for women, who told The Grindstone that being a mom is “challenging,” yes, but that doesn’t mean she’s striving to balance the supposed scales. When asked about work/life balance, she said:

I don’t strive for a concept of balance — I never have. It almost seems like a silly idea to me — that life should play out in some sort of contrived separation between “work” and “relaxation” or “family time.” As a CEO and mom, I’m always working and always “mom.” They exist in an almost blended fashion. I lean in both directions depending on which needs me more in that moment.

Ummm, nice try.  I’m guessing Amanda Steinberg is not a particularly dedicated mom .  What a crock– “always working and always mom.”  I’m all about work/life(/blogging) balance, but when I am teaching my class or running regression models on election data I’m not “dad,” and when I’m changing diapers or reading Wocket in my Pocket I’m not “working.”  I make a conscious decision to spend as much time doing the latter (okay, not really the diapers) as I possibly can while still being a responsible scholar/professor/adviser/blogger, etc.  That’s work-life balance.

Yeah, it is certainly noteworthy that we look at this very differently with women and men (one of the reasons I often feel more of an affinity with working moms than fellow working dads), but let’s not pretend it’s something that isn’t real or can be finessed through semantics.

Call of the wild

So, in our nightly reading these days, Evan and I have been reading a nice book all about mammals (he’s so over Dr. Seuss).  Anyway, last night was apes and we talked a bit about the Gibbon.  Reminded me of the coolest zoo experience I’ve ever had.  Took my family for a visit to the Columbus Zoo back in the Ohio State days and while we were near the gibbons, they carried on for several minutes with their famous long call.  Thanks to the internet I was able to pull up a youtube video so that Evan could hear what I was talking about:

Learn more here.

Awesome infographic of the day

Via Kevin Drum.  This display of the US interstate system in the style of a subway map is super-cool (at least to me):