Rick Santorum seems to think that energy consumption is a good per se. That is simply not true. It is better to have an energy efficient house than to pay more for heat and air conditioning to have the same comfort level in a house with poor energy efficiency. It is better to travel in a well tuned car getting good gas mileage than to travel in a gas guzzler with no advantage in safety or comfort. Energy is something that you pay for and use in order to achieve some end. If you can achieve the same end using less energy, that is all to the good. Moreover, there are external costs to using energy. Greenhouse gas emissions contribute to global warming which it a grave problem for future generations. Consumption of oil and oil products makes our balance of payments problem worse while increasing our dependence of foreign governments that control oil exporting countries.
A unnamed White House official apparently thinks that the Congress has already passed the only important legislation for 2012. How about the federal budget for the fiscal year that starts in September 2012? That budget debate will define the way the government operates for a year. It is especially important because that budget debate will be the opening shot in determining the capabilities of the military after the ends of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and in view of Arab Spring. It will also be significant in terms of the federal deficit, and thus the rate of growth of the economy, the rate of growth of the federal debt, and such things as the balance of payments deficit.
An unnamed Republican spokesman seems to think that small businesses generate employment. They also destroy jobs. The concern is the net employment growth rate.
For the U.S. private sector, the BDS show that the average annual gross job creation rate over the 2000-2005 period is 16.4 percent of employment and that the average annual gross job destruction rate over the same period is 15.1 percent. Hence, the net employment growth rate for the U.S. private sector in any given year is accounted for by some establishments growing at a high rate while another group of establishments are contracting at a high rate. [CES pdf]
If you look at the local strip mall, whenever you see a new business occupying one of the buildings, it is because a business that once occupied that space is now gone.
The location and intensity of earthquakes of the year of 2011 plotted out on a map -- animated to show when they occurred, with louder sounds for more intense earthquakes. Following the map, there are frequency plots.
The yellow spots left for each quake by the end of the year clearly show the major earthquake zones around the world. The data also clearly show the existence of aftershocks, but I thought they indicated clustering over very long distances.
This is a great display, showing how very powerful new data displays can be in conveying information.
I have a lot more sympathy for the Japanese after seeing this!
China's Vice President Xi Jinping is visiting the United States. News broadcasts seem bemused by the contrast between American concern for Chinese people and American differences with the policies of the Chinese government. There is a very long history of American concern for the Chinese people, going back long before World War II, and in that war China and the United States were allied against common enemies. While America has not completely gotten rid of prejudice it is much reduced in recent decades; the successes of Chinese Americans have convinced most of us of the value that they add to our society. Our current media phenom is basketball star Jeremy Lin. And yes, we do have differences with the policies of the Government of China, as we as individuals do with our own government and as our government does with the governments of such close allies as the United Kingdom and Israel.
I just saw a reporter for BBC News cut off a spokesperson for Save the Children who was explaining the very high child malnutrition and child mortality caused in recent year by the high price of food and the poverty of their parents, as shown in the new report A Life Free from Hunger: Tackling child malnutrition. Apparently the reporter thought that there were more important stories than millions of starving children. Really?
This is a nice short video. It is great on showing that very advanced materials can be produced by very simple means. Watch, but don't be fooled that really important commercial applications of graphene will be developed very quickly.
A few years ago I was asked by a very good chemist whether there would be any applications of nanotechnology other than in catalysis. I suspect that there will be important applications in electronics and electrical devices (such as solar cells). There may be sensors that will be important in other fields. There may be tiny machines with practical applications. There may be biomedical applications, essentially molecules designed with complex pharmaceutical functions.
The Economist has an article which considers relatively little understood aspects of the current job market. The fundamental point is that the rate at which people are changing from one job to another (the churn) is way down.
Churn is a mechanism by which labour markets reallocate workers towards more efficient ends. In the typical job-to-job move (that is, without any intervening stint of unemployment) an American worker can expect a rise in wages of over 8%. This gain represents, at least in part, an improvement in productivity. As workers obtain skills and find better job matches, their output and earnings rise. And as firms obtain ever more suitable labour, they can afford to pay higher wages. In this way, the churning of the labour market contributes to growth in the potential output of the economy.
Moreover:
Individuals who graduate from college and enter the labour force during a typical recession can expect an initial earnings loss of about 9% (compared with what they might expect in normal circumstances).
In the past, young Americans could expect to change jobs often and to see their earnings increase rapidly in those early years. Moreover, every new job a person gets during his/her lifetime is likely to have a rate of pay based on the person's then current rate of pay. Thus, if due to low starting pay and slower rates of changes of jobs, at the end of this recession people have a significantly lower rate of pay than they otherwise would have had, they can expect to have lower pay for the rest of their lives.
And of course, the unemployment rate is very high among the young in this Great Recession!
Yet in some circumstances, sometimes found in anthropology or sociology, certain anecdotes are data.
Language is imprecise.
I can imagine that collecting and analyzing anecdotes in circulation about various candidates for the presidency, one could learn about their relative popularity, their strong points and their weak points as seen by the electorate. In such a situation, anecdotes might indeed be regarded as data.
"Data" is defined as "Facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis."
"Anecdote" is defined as "A short and amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person." or "An account regarded as unreliable or hearsay."
The problem is that in our daily lives we hear anecdotes all the time, and frequently use these anecdotes to form opinions and guide actions. You hear from one friend that he had a bad experience at a local restaurant, and from another that he had a great experience at a different restaurant. Which do you visit next?
On the other hand, scientists seek to draw conclusions from experiments under controlled conditions, often replicated, and often designed to explore the relations between factors hypothesized to be causal and resultant. Still, there are descriptive sciences which depend on observations of "naturally occurring" phenomena. However, data differ from anecdotes in their purpose, the ways in which they are formed, and the quality of the observation.
Scientists get upset when people regard conclusions drawn from anecdotal evidence to be as good as conclusions drawn by the scientific community from scientific data.
The Kojo Nnamdi Show on public radio had an interesting show on the future of investigative journalism, and links to the video shown above. Both raise the question of how muckraking journalism is to be institutionalized (and paid for) in the future. As newspapers are facing more and more competition from other media they are laying off reporters, and investigative journalism is expensive in reporter time as well as money.
The progressive movement in the United States a century ago was fueled by muckraking reporters and public interest in their articles exposing corruption in government and for profit organizations. It seems to me that we need very much to continue the tradition of investigative reporting, and I hope that all the existing ways that it is conducted continue in operation. But clearly, we need new approaches as well.
It is also important that we push for legislation requiring transparency in government, corporations and civil society. That would include required audits to assure that the information that is made available is credible. Making sure that credible information is readily available should help investigative reporters in their work of compiling and interpreting the data and communicating it to the public including to those in responsible positions who can resolve the problems that are uncovered and disclosed.
I suggest that the problem is different in poor nations than in affluent ones. The poor countries often have more need for investigative reporting to expose problems and make them known to the public, while they have less developed news outlets, and of course poverty.
The Center for Public Integrity and The Center for Investigative Reporting are doing investigative reporting, and represent new institutional models providing that function. These organizations are financed by foundations and by donations from the public. (I encourage such donations.) Perhaps we could see similar civil society organizations I rather like the idea of stand alone investigative reporting centers, at least for some kinds of investigation.
Newspapers and magazines have been supported by subscriptions, and advertising. Commercial radio and television (including the news networks) have been supported by advertising, and public radio and television (which have very good news services in the United States) have government and foundation support as well as donations from the public. The USIA has government support for its international news services, as do public networks from many other countries. Internet news sources have been supported by advertising and by donated services. Reuters, Agence France Press, and United Press International are examples of news services which play the role of intermediary distributers as well as reporting services.
These illustrate the range of possible financial sources -- sale of news to other outlets, subscriptions, advertising, government and foundation grants, and donations from the public of funds and/or services. I would suggest that Wikileaks is another approach which makes information available to both the public and to reporters.
I rather like partnerships with schools of journalism, accounting, management, public administration (etc.) what would involve university students in investigative journalism under the guidance and supervision of experienced journalists. So too, internships might have an important role. Students make great interns, and learning skills of investigative reporting should be of value to students in many disciplines.
I would also note that crowd sourcing might be useful. In recent reporting exposing conflict of interests in Congressmen and the legislation that they sponsor, David Fallis of the Washington Post faced a daunting task of reviewing huge numbers of Congressional earmarks to determine which if any resulted in benefits for their proponents. This seems a great illustration of something that would be possible to achieve at low cost to the investigating organization through crowd sourcing.
I suspect that developing countries could use more help in developing and institutionalizing investigative reporting. UNESCO provides some assistance, with its very limited funding, training reporters, and UNESCO protests harm to reporters. Reporters Without Borders provides some help, such as fighting censorship and advocating the protection of reporters. Donor assistance in this area would have to be provided very carefully, since many governments would see outside governmental support for investigative reporting as a dangerous and improper intrusion into their sovereignty. Still, making funds available to organizations such schools of journalism, the Center for Public Integrity and the Center for Investigative Reporting to enable them to meet with, cooperate with and assist colleagues in developing countries might be useful and appropriate.
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