Category: Data Source

When asked the above question, and given a list of 50 names, Americans responded with these rankings:

1 Albert Einstein
2 Bill Gates
3 Marie Curie
4 Stephen Hawking
5 Condoleezza Rice
6 Bill Clinton
7 Sandra Day O’Connor
8 Oprah Winfrey
9 Warren Buffett
10 Jane Goodall

I will object to Johnny Carson, Dr. Phil, and Ralph Lauren in the Top 50, but applaud Hayao Miyazaki, Susan Polgar, and Jackie Chan.  Here is the full list.  The only academics in the Top 50 are Einstein, Hawking, and Curie, not one person from the social sciences is represented, unless you count Condi Rice. 

Addendum: Thanks to MacNeil, who directs me to further information about the survey.  The wording of this post has been amended to reflect what appears to be an agenda-setting role for Marilyn vos Savant; she appears to have provided the initial list.

They pronounce "six" a bit like "sucks," and make "grown" to "grow-en." 

"More" and "sure" are pronounced mua and shua, whereas in Australia they would be pronounced as maw and shaw.

"Iggs for brickfast" is another classic Kiwi pronunciation.  Here is a full discussion, including a detailed contrast with Australian English, you need never be confused again.

This awesome New Zealand hotel built out of a hillside, and a defunct train and plane, has three sleeping options:

"Sleeping inside a 1950’s Bristol Freighter Plane refurbished into 2 beautiful motel rooms.

"Sleeping inside a 1950’s Rail Carriage 3 room motel unit, which sleeps six.

"Sleeping like a Hobbit–underground with a circular window."

That is from Boing Boing, photo included, I am not sleeping there but I would select the Hobbit option.  Here is the original link with geographic information as well.  Here is a site Unusual Hotels of the World.

33 percent of the citizenry of the United Arab Emirates is clinically obese.

17 percent of the citizenry has diabetes.

The new energy bill will give us an extra hour of daylight savings time for parts of both March and November.  But is this a good idea?  Is daylight savings time at all a good idea?  I don’t know, but here is a new argument I never heard before:

“Springing forward” is tantamount to imposing a mild case of jet lag throughout the country, with potentially unhappy consequences.

Might that mean more traffic accidents?

…following the spring shift to Daylight Savings Time (when one hour of sleep is lost) there is a measurable increase in the number of traffic accidents that result in fatalities. Furthermore, it replicates the absence of any “rebound” reduction of accidents following the fall shift to DST (when the opportunity is present for an additional hour of sleep).

Of the two competing hypotheses for this increase in accidents, namely the one that suggests that it is the increased sleep deficit that causes the change in accident rate, versus notions based upon reduced illumination levels when driving to work, or suppositions that people forget the DST time change, fail to adjust their clocks, and find themselves rushing to work to avoid being late, the sleep hypothesis seems to be the most tenable. Hypotheses based upon haste and dim morning light both predict the bulk of the increased accidents to be confined to the morning hours. The sleep loss hypothesis would predict that individuals become more tired as the day wears on and hence the bulk of the accidents will appear later in the day. It is, of course, this latter pattern which appears with most of the accident fatality increase confined to the period after noon.

If the sleep loss hypothesis is correct, then why isn’t there a reduction in the number of traffic accidents in the fall, when the shift back to standard time provides an extra hour for sleep? Although this was the pattern observed in one study (Coren, 1996b) it has not replicated in other studies. The failure of the “safety rebound” may simply have to do with human nature. Just because a person has the opportunity to sleep for an addition hour does not mean that people actually will go to sleep on time. Many may spend that extra hour socializing or watching television. In some instances, where individuals do go to bed at the appropriate time, their usual circadian rhythm may still wake them after 7 or 8 hours in response internal signals or the external morning increase in illumination. Contrast this to what happens in the spring, where an individual’s work schedule will enforce the person’s awakening on the new DST time in order to meet job commitments.

Here is a blog post (with further discussion) on the topic, here is the underlying study, the original tip is from Eric Rasmusen.  I have yet to see data on whether Indiana — which does not adopt Daylight Savings Time — is in fact a safer place to drive, at least for a part of each year.

Consider the four square feet immediately around you. Now consider that are you occupying your average per capita share of the Great American Self Storage Empire. According to the Self Storage Association, a trade group charged with monitoring such things, the country now possesses some 1,875 billion square feet of personal storage. All this space is contained in nearly 40,000 facilities owned and operated by more than 2,000 entrepreneurs, including a handful of publicly traded giants like Public Storage, Storage USA, and Shurgard.

What this translates into, apart from one hell of a lot of stationary bikes kept behind padlocked metal doors, is an industry that now exceeds the revenues of Hollywood (and doesn’t have to deal with Tom Cruise). One in 11 American households, according to a recent survey, owns self-storage space–an increase of some 75 percent from 1995. Most operators of self-storage facilities report 90 percent occupancy, with average stints among its renters of 15 months. Last year alone saw a 24 percent spike in the number of self-storage units on the market.

The causes?  Lots of moving, ebay sellers, massive spending on large consumption goods, and smaller (or absent) attics and basements in many new homes.  Here is the full story.

We collected data on over 1000 taxicab rides in New Haven, CT in 2001. After controlling for a host of other variables, we find two potential racial disparities in tipping: (1) African-American cab drivers were tipped approximately one-third less than white cab drivers; and (2) African-American passengers tipped approximately one-half the amount of white passengers (African-American passengers are 3.7 times more likely than white passengers to leave no tip).

Many studies have documented seller discrimination against consumers, but this study tests and finds that consumers discriminate based on the seller’s race. African-American passengers also participated in the racial discrimination. While African-American passengers generally tipped less, they also tipped black drivers approximately one-third less than they tipped white drivers.

The finding that African-American passengers tend to tip less may not be robust to including better controls for passenger social class. But it is still possible to test for the racialized inference that cab drivers (who also could not directly observe passenger income) might make. Regressions suggest that a "rational" statistical discriminator would expect African Americans to tip 56.5% less than white passengers.

I’ve read the abstract but not yet the paper.  Note the authors wish to ban tipping [NB: they call it mandatory tipping] to limit racism.  Thanks to Mitch Berkson for the pointer.

Each year Slovakia produces about one car for each six citizens, of course mostly for export.  This is the highest such ratio in the world. 

See Business Week, 25 July 2005.

If Zambia had converted all the aid it received since 1960 to investment
and all of that investment to growth, it would have had a per capita GDP of about $20,000 by the early 1990s. Instead, Zambia’s per capita GDP in the early 1990s was lower than it had been in 1960, hovering under $500.

That is Bill Easterly, courtesy of Mahalanobis.  And did I mention that fifty years ago, South Korea had about the same standard of living?

Average percentage of the U.K. population that Britons believe to be immigrants: 21

Actual percentage: 8

That is from Harper’s Index, July 2005 issue.

In 1968, the number of pigs in China was 5.2 million; today it is 508 million. The number of poultry in China in 1968 was 12.3 million; today it is 13 billion.

Here is the story.  Yes this is great news, but it is also a reason why people are worried about China as a mixing bowl for an influenza pandemic.

Here is the link, thanks to Randall Parker for the pointer and commentary on the feasibility of wind power.  "Blue" is for superb conditions for wind power, and "red" is for outstanding, in case you can’t read the print on the chart.  And here is a wind map for the last six hours.

Grade inflation has not been constant through time.  Mark Thoma at Economist’s View offers some hypotheses.

There are two episodes that account for most grade inflation. The first
is from the 1960s through the early 1970s. This is usually explained by
the draft rules for the Vietnam War. The second episode begins around
1990 and is harder to explain….

My
study finds an interesting correlation in the data. During the time
grades were increasing, budgets were also tightening inducing a
substitution towards younger and less permanent faculty. I broke down
grade inflation by instructor rank and found it is much higher among
assistant professors, adjuncts, TAs, instructors, etc. than for
associate or full professors. These are instructors who are usually
hired year-to-year or need to demonstrate teaching effectiveness for
the job market, so they have an incentive to inflate evaluations as
much as possible, and high grades are one means of manipulating student
course evaluations.

But what are the consequences of grade inflation?  A new study takes advantage of a tres bon experiment.  In May of 1968 French students rioted, were suppressed by the police, but then joined by 10 million striking workers leading to a near revolutionary situation.  To quiet things down many students that year were accepted to universities which in former and later years they would not have qualified for.  What happened to those students?

Eric Maurin and Sandra McNally write:

We show that the lowering of thresholds at an early (and highly selective stage) of the higher education system enabled a significant proportion of students born between 1947 and 1950 (particularly in 1948 and 1949) to pursue more years of higher education that would otherwise have been possible. This was followed by a significant increase in their subsequent wages and occupational attainment, which was particularly evident for persons coming from a middle-class family background.  Finally, returns were transmitted to the next generation on account of the relationship between parental education and that of their children.

The results are surprising but consistent with Bowen and Bok who argue that affirmative action did not harm minority students who were accepted at universities at which they would not have qualified based on grades alone.

I’m puzzled but not yet ready to retire my reputation as a tough grader – my best students deserve no less.

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