Hapgood

This is the new story out — it’s a mancovery! From Bloomberg: Men, who lost more than twice as many jobs as women during the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, have landed 88 percent of the non-farm jobs created since the recession ended in June 2009. The share of men saying the economy… Continue reading

A poor man said to a rich one: “All my money goes for food.” “Now that’s your trouble,” said the rich man. “I only spend five percent of my money on food.” (From a Sufi tale, recounted here.) Percentages are a really helpful tool, obviously. But raw numbers can matter too. Continue reading

From Kevin Drum’s Chart o’ the Day: Lots of interesting stuff going on there. Notice, in particular, how the trust in science falls off a cliff for moderates in the 70s. It’s also fascinating that conservative trust in science used to be as high (if not higher) than that of liberals 40 years ago. This is still… Continue reading

From EnergyStar.gov: Lifecycle impact is an invaluable tool in making fair comparisons.  It’s easy, for example, to get hung up on the small amount of mercury in a CFL bulb, a percentage of which can escape into the environment if the bulb is crushed in a landfill. But the biggest contributor to mercury pollution is coal-fired plants, which… Continue reading

My new favorite term from epidemiology: J-Curve. There’s a lot of things that increase your mortality in a more-or-less linear way. The more you smoke, the greater your all-cause mortality risk, for example. This isn’t to say you increase your chance of death by 100% moving from one pack a day to two. But on… Continue reading

The Silicon Valley conception of privacy isn’t working for anyone except Silicon Valley. We know that. Charlie Stross, who is one smart dude, points out that if you follow the corporate-driven push to overshare to its logical conclusion your phone becomes a handy-dandy genocide machine, or, in the near term, the perfect device for this year’s Rufie-carrying… Continue reading

A decent point about comparison that’s often missed: comparing like-to-like means that interventions must be executed at the same level of proficiency as controls: For the past few years, proponents of barefoot running have argued that modern athletic shoes compromise natural running form. But now a first-of-its-kind study suggests that, in the right circumstances, running shoes make… Continue reading

I haven’t seen this graph referenced in the recent discussion around Blackboard’s latest purchase, which is strange, because it explains almost everything: A while back, Blackboard decided that the saturation and commodification of the LMS market meant that the path to greater profitability was not more contracts, but a higher average contract price. Under such… Continue reading