Category: Data Source

In 723 of 1,431 calls, for example, the helper never got around to asking whether the caller was feeling suicidal.  And
when suicidal thoughts were identified, the helpers asked about
available means less than half the time.  There were more egregious
lapses, too: in 72 cases a caller was actually put on hold until he or
she hung up.  Seventy-six times the helper screamed at, or was rude to,
the caller.  Four were told they might as well kill themselves.

There were 33 evident on-line suicide attempts, yet only six rescue
efforts, sometimes because the caller ended the communication.  In one
case, a caller who’d overdosed passed out, yet the helper hung up.

Here is the full story, by Christopher Shea.  I am curious how much of this problem is due to the non-profit structure of the institutions running the lines and how much is due to the behavioral quirks of human beings faced with the suicidal tendencies of others…

From the comments: "Also, how would a for-profit suicide hotline work? Call a 900 number if
you’re having suicidal thoughts? I find it hard to imagine that a
for-profit suicide hotline system would generate *more* suicide
prevention, though maybe I’m wrong."

Predict How Long You’ll Live (Northwest Mutual)

Predict Your Child’s Due Date (Ayres)

Predict Your Child’s Adult Height (University of
Saskatchewan)

Predict Justice Kennedy’s Vote (Ayres)

Predict Your Next Move in Rock-Paper-Scissors (Chappie)

There are many other prediction tools here (do click), from Ian Ayres.  Ayres requests that you email him other prediction applets, which he will add to the page.  Ayres also has a new book out, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking by Numbers is the New Way to be Smart; it is highly readable and also endorsed by Steve Levitt.

I thank Ian Ayres for the pointer.

Here is the latest, by Emmanuel Saez and co-authors; note I linked to this paper yesterday but now I have looked at it.  Here is one key sentence:

…we find that short-term and long-term mobility among all workers has been quite stable since the 1950s.

To disaggregate, note that mobility among males is down but mobility among females is up.  (It is an interesting question whether there is a causal relationship here.)

Here is a much earlier MR post on mobility.  Keep these links in mind next time you hear claims about mobility, and I believe you will hear many such claims in September.  See also our earlier posts on Dalton Conley, who shows just how much inequality is generated within the same family.

It should be noted that Saez is the leading measurer of income inequality and also a critic of such inequality.  In his view a constant level of mobility means that no force is offsetting ongoing inequality.  I believe he would likely read his own paper as support for a left-wing view of the world and as support for concern with income inequality.  He would not read his work as reason to dismiss the mobility issue.  My view differs, as I worry about mobility — can a hard-working person get ahead? — but I do not worry about inequality per se, nor do I require of mobility that it overturn a particular level of inequality. 

• China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government
  permission.

• Craig Venter is one step closer to becoming a god.

• 500 Years of female faces in western art (video).

A YouGov poll has found that almost 10% of Britons aspire to being an
author, followed by sports personality, pilot, astronaut and event
organiser on the list of most coveted jobs.

Here is the link.  Event organiser?

Overall, 74 percent [of men visiting streetwalkers] reported that they always wear a condom (men with stable relationships were less likely to use protection, at least with prostitutes).

It’s not so hard to write down the underlying utility function here, is it?

That is from the September 2007 issue of Atlantic Monthly, citing research by economist Marina della Giusta and others, published in Applied Economics.  The working paper seems to be here.

In another development at Atlantic Monthly, but unrelated to the above factoid, or to the more general idea of yikes, the new Megan McArdle blog is now up and running.  Here is Megan’s post on what old people deserve.

…despite Chavez’s "revolution for the poor" the Gini coefficient [in Venezuela] has increased from 0.44 in 2000 to 0.48 in 2005.

Here is the post and source.

Where do most tigers live?

In the United States it turns out.  There are 4,000 tigers residing in captivity in Texas alone, where private ownership of tigers is legal.  The number of tigers left in the wild is perhaps no more than 5,100-7,500.

A tiger cub costs about $1,000 while the more exotic blue-eyed white tiger costs $15,000.

That is from The Book of General Ignorance, an interesting compilation of not so well known facts. 

I learned also that chamelons do not change color to fit their background (the changes are determined by their emotional states), moths are disoriented by flames rather than attracted to them, and (possibly) America was named after Richard Amerike rather than Amerigo Vespucci; I still haven’t gotten to the bottom of that one.  Amerike, a wealthy merchant, helped finance Cabot’s voyage, and asked that any discovered lands be named after him.

Analysts estimate that 20 percent of all luxury goods are sold in Japan and another 30 percent to Japanese traveling abroad — meaning Japanese buy half of all luxury goods.  Today, approximately 40 percent of all Japanese own a Vuitton product.

That is from Dana Thomas’s really quite interesting Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster.  Thomas believes that the Japanese are so infatuated with luxury goods because they wish to brand themselves in what otherwise pretends to be a "classless" society.

Between 1962 and 2002, life expectancy in the Middle East and North Africa…increased from around 48 years to 69 years…it was…the strongest performance of any region in the world…

…China, which saw life expectancy growing at 1.6 percent in the 1960s, collapsing to around 0.2 percent in the 1980s and 1990s, while income growth was going in the other direction.

Did you know that The Gambia, Yemen, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Libya were all in the top ten gainers in life expectancy, 1962-2002?

Here is the paper.  Here is the guy’s (very interesting) blog, via Bryan Caplan.

When an investment banker set out to buy a $1.5 million home on Long
Island last month, his mortgage broker quoted an interest rate of 8
percent.  Three days later, when the buyer said he would take the loan,
the mortgage banker had bad news: the new rate was 13 percent.

Here is the full story.

The air filling Carnegie Hall weighs about seventy thousand pounds.

That is from the new Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and other Mysteries of the Atmosphere, by Gabrielle Walker.

China could buy every African quoted company with its foreign-exchange reserves.

Here is the source, and that is via Pablo Halkyard, who wonders: "Maybe its actually an Africa fact of the day."

Here are Greg Rehmke’s links to material on Africa and development.

In response to Paul Krugman and others, FCC commissioners Robert McDowell writes:

The OECD says the U.S. has dropped from 12th in the world in broadband subscribers per 100 residents to 15th.  The OECD’s methodology is seriously flawed, however. According to an analysis by the Phoenix Center, if all OECD countries including the U.S. enjoyed 100% broadband penetration — with all homes and businesses being connected — our rank would fall to 20th. The U.S. would be deemed a relative failure because the OECD methodology measures broadband connections per capita, putting countries with larger household sizes at a statistical disadvantage.

Here are statistics on household size; I am suspicious that McDowell cites only a polar point (which in essence is ranking *only* household size, and not how much household size contributes to the current rank order) in support of his case.  Not every argument in his rebuttal succeeds.

More fruitfully, should we should compare Europe to the whole U.S. or to individual states?:

…if we compare many of our states individually with some countries that are allegedly beating us in the broadband race, we are actually winning. Forty-three American states have a higher household broadband adoption rate than all but five EU countries. Even large rural western states such as Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and both Dakotas exhibit much stronger household broadband adoption rates than France or Britain. Even if we use the OECD’s flawed methodology, New Jersey has a higher penetration rate than fourth-ranked Korea. Alaska is more broadband-saturated than France.

Maybe federal policy is not mainly at fault, though more contestability is still a good idea.  By the way, here are some alternative broadband rankings, the U.S. comes in twelfth.

The pointer is thanks to Ben Davis.

Addendum: Over at Mark Thoma’s, Peter Schaeffer has a good comment at July 23, 2007 at 11:05.

Singapore comes in first, Russia comes in last ("Natasha, we’re going to be late!"); not all countries were surveyed.  Here is the article and graph, via Private Sector Development blog.  Having an orientation toward the future is also strongly correlated with both happiness and confidence.