May 2013
i am so ready
tomorrow’s picnic: prepped
tonight’s fast & furious tickets: purchased
summertime beer: obtained and chilled
nails: robin’s egg blue
sunscreen: lots of it
LET’S DO THIS MEMORIAL DAY
i thought my life was empty when i finished “pretty wild” but now netflix suggested “ny prep” and these children in designer clothes are arguing about whether operation smile is meaningful or whether there are, like, a million things happening in the world that are like, way more important than, like, cleft palate, or whether, like, these children totally die!
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or in other words
I WANT AN OOMPA LOOMPA NOW, DADDY
whine
there’s been a whole lot of [redacted] lately and not a lot of [other redacted thing] and i’m annoyed and complainy because [vague and unspecified].
also, it is hot but cloudy and humid which is extremely annoying as weather goes, and the coffee shop has the fireplace on because they are ridiculous.
“ESPN is a great corporation. It is ungodly profitable. It creates a mere 43% of...”
– Lawyers, Guns & Money
Is preschool declining in its overall... →
Programs beginning before 1980 produced significantly larger effect sizes (.33 standard deviations) than those that began later (.16 standard deviations). Declining effect sizes over time are disappointing, as we might hope that lessons from prior evaluations and advances in the science of child development would have led to an increase in program effects over time. However, the likely reason...
Does less income mean less representation? →
We assemble a novel dataset of matched legislative and constituent votes and demonstrate that less income does not mean less representation. We show: (i) The opinions of high- and low-income voters are highly correlated; the legislator’s vote often reflects the desire of both. (ii) What differences in representation by income exist vary by legislator party. Republicans more often vote the will...
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torn
read the bling ring and watched 6 episodes of “pretty wild.” unsure whether i should set the world on fire or go shoplift marc jacobs handbags.
Preventing Youth Violence and Dropout: A... →
Improving the long-term life outcomes of disadvantaged youth remains a top policy priority in the United States, although identifying successful interventions for adolescents – particularly males – has proven challenging. This paper reports results from a large randomized controlled trial of an intervention for disadvantaged male youth grades 7-10 from high-crime Chicago neighborhoods. The...
A mess with which I am comfortable →
Having established that survey weighting is a mess, I should also acknowledge that, by this standard, regression modeling is also a mess, involving many arbitrary choices of variable selection, transformations and modeling of interaction. Nonetheless, regression modeling is a mess with which I am comfortable and, perhaps more relevant to the discussion, can be extended using multilevel models to...
“When I read stories about disability scams [such as the recent Disney debacle] I...”
– “Misplaced Outrage: On the Disney disability controversy” | Bad Cripple »
… In addition to a stunning level of ignorance about disability in general, I have an additional concern. As noted in my previous post about the Disney is the emergence of able bodied outrage. Here I refer to a multitude...
The Touch-Screen Generation →
Calvert’s research is designed to answer a series of very responsible, high-minded questions: Can toddlers learn from iPads? Can they transfer what they learn to the real world? What effect does interactivity have on learning? What role do familiar characters play in children’s learning from iPads? All worthy questions, and important, but also all considered entirely from an adult’s point of...
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A Helpful Comparison
yourmonkeycalled:
After I read the news of Yahoo!’s massive Tumblr acquisition, I had trouble wrapping my head around what a massive amount of money a billion dollars is, so I came up with this:
Picture an area the size of Rhode Island. Now picture, inside that, a football field full of Statues of Liberty. Stretching to the moon and back. A blue whale. Now picture a billion dollars.
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Things I was surprised to remember today
How to factor polynomials. Which I haven’t done since, let’s say, 1996.
WHAT ELSE IS INSIDE YOU, BRAIN?
Sentences to ponder →
Fashion models are almost twice as likely to get their visas as computer programmers, by one rough measure.
More poor live in suburbs than in urban areas,... →
Bucking longstanding patterns in the United States, more poor people now live in the nation’s suburbs than in urban areas, according to a new analysis. As poverty mounted throughout the nation over the past decade, the number of poor people living in suburbs surged 67% between 2000 and 2011 — a much bigger jump than in cities, researchers for the Brookings Institution said in a book...
Does cellphone coverage make violence more likely... →
Overall, our quantitative models demonstrate a clear positive association between cell phone coverage and the occurrence of violent organized collective action. This effect persists when controlling for a series of standard explanations of violence, as well as unobserved, time-invariant factors at the country and even grid level. Plainly, our results suggest that local cell phone coverage...
Further problems with ACA implementation →
Employers are increasingly recognizing they may be able to avoid certain penalties under the federal health law by offering very limited plans that can lack key benefits such as hospital coverage. Benefits advisers and insurance brokers—bucking a commonly held expectation that the law would broadly enrich benefits—are pitching these low-benefit plans around the country. They cover minimal...
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i broke him
“the gossip game” on vh1. peter rosenberg accusing some gossip columnist named angela of leaking information about him to media takeout and her claiming it was because she donated her phone and someone texted from the donated phone. mind-numbingly useless and gratingly shrill.
"i'll watch anything"
C claims he’ll watch anything on tv. i am testing that theory. so far, we’ve watched a spanish-language comedy show set in a hospital, a 20 minute documentary on how to sort your waste into compost, recycle, and landfill (including an exciting new phone app!), and are now watching fundraising on the 700 club. what will we find next?!
Study: Nearly half of all death certificates are... →
Death certificates are important public health documents. They help epidemiologists understand leading causes of deaths and how they are changing. They power big studies of what killed us in the past—and what kills us now. And, according to a new Center for Disease Control study, about half of them may be wrong. Columbia University’s Barbara A. Wexelman lead a survey of 521 resident physicians...
A new GOP bill would prevent the government from... →
In what’s becoming a biennial tradition, another House Republican wants to cut the Census down to size. Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) is rolling out the Census Reform Act this week, having formally introduced it April 18. The bill, as Michael McAuliff of the Huffington Post notes, would abolish the Current Population Survey, which is used to compute the unemployment rate and labor force...
House Agriculture Committee Proposal Would Force 2... →
The House Agriculture Committee is poised to consider a farm bill this week that would eliminate Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) assistance to nearly 2 million low-income people and, more generally, cause significant hardships for millions of low-income households, as we explain in a new paper. That’s because the Committee’s bill would cut funds for SNAP (formerly known as food...
The Present and Future of Higher Education →
While The New Yorker runs a lengthy piece on the (mostly) awesomeness of MOOCs from a classically technologically fetishist standpoint (although it at least does present the objections to them), the students of one adjunct professor are crowdfunding his surgery for a broken leg because as an adjunct and provider for his family, he doesn’t qualify for health insurance.
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reading milestones
at this point in the year, i have read twice as many books as there are weeks. and only about 80% of them were total crap! here’s the good ones:
the orphan master’s son - adam johnson. totally not the kind of book i would pick up - soldier in north korea, ugh - but it won the tournament of books and got all kinds of awards. and i tore through it, totally absorbed, and now have been...
mom: where are you right now?
me: at the park, by the creek, in a hammock.
mom: this post-finals vacation thing is really working out for you.
me: i do my best!
rlly important question
what will be the jam of the summer? or YOUR jam of the summer? or a jam for the summer?
A plain blog about politics: Young Voting Update →
Takoma Park, Maryland, has gone ahead: they’ve lowered the voting age for local elections to 16. Excellent. We’re talking a suburb of 17K citizens, so it’s not exactly a ton of 16 and 17 year old voters. Not to mention that giving them the vote only for local elections isn’t exactly likely to produce stampedes at the polling places. Still, it’s something.
“If only the government would apply the same level of thoroughness to their...”
– Meet the Chinese ‘censors’ who watch 700 pornographic movies every week
Army Sexual Assault Prevention Office Coordinator... →
A soldier assigned to coordinate a sexual assault prevention program in Texas is under investigation for “abusive sexual contact” and other alleged misconduct and has been suspended from his duties, the Army announced Tuesday. Just last week an Air Force officer who headed a sexual assault prevention office was himself arrested on charges of groping a woman in a parking lot. The Army...
