This article reminds us that collapsing oil prices played a big role in bringing down the Soviet Union, and now are likely to cause chaos in societies across Africa and the Middle East. The list of countries predicted to “explode”: Nigeria, Angola, Kenya, Uganda, Egypt, and Libya.
Here’s an interesting interactive tool on FiveThirtyEight.com where you can play around with U.S. voter turnout and preferences among various demographic groups.
I ran a few scenarios:
So the bottom line is that the minority groups tend to vote Democrat.The uneducated whites tend to vote Republican. The educated whites are the swing voters who end up being the deciding factor. So it is hard to see how a Republican candidate who appeals strongly to uneducated whites but alienates educated whites could ever stand much of a chance.
Ontheissues.org is a little bit junky but it has a lot of information on where the candidates stand, well, on the issues. It then graphs them on an interesting spectrum based on where they stand on government intervention in the social and economic spheres.
Social Questions: Liberals and libertarians agree in choosing the less-government answers, while conservatives and populists agree in choosing the more-restrictive answers.
We kept hearing that it was the warmest winter ever, and then the blizzard came along and disproved it, right? Not exactly, according to NPR:
Scientists have been doing some forensic work to figure out what set this megastorm in motion. And they think they’ve found a trail that starts with the weather pattern called El Niño…
“A lot of climate change is actually going into the oceans,” he says.
He means the oceans are absorbing a lot of the extra heat from the atmosphere. That can alter their circulation, and where and when they release that heat back into the atmosphere.
“It’s changing the behavior of the oceans in a way that affects weather patterns around the globe,” Mann says.
I’m going to try picking the three most frightening posts, three most hopeful posts, and three most interesting posts (that are not particularly frightening or hopeful) from January.
3 most frightening posts
3 most hopeful posts
3 most interesting posts
Political season is data science season! Here is some more on Nate Silver’s forecasting methods. If you are reading this in real time (Sunday January 31), by tomorrow night we will find out what actually happens. I will reproduce some graphics here – these are all from the FiveThirtyEight site, so please thank me for the free advertising and don’t send me to copyright jail.
For Clinton vs. Sanders, here is Nate’s average of polls as of today. He gives more recent polls greater weighting, and also adjusts somehow for bias shown in the same polls in the past.
Average of polls: Clinton 48.0% vs. Sanders 42.7%
Now, this is within the 4-6% “margin of error” reported by most polls. (I find this easier to find on the RealClearPolitics site, although curiously it lists margins of error for Democratic polls but not Republican ones. RealClearPolitics does a straight-up poll average without all the corrections that today is Clinton 47.3% vs. Sanders 44%. So all the corrections don’t make an enormous difference.) I can’t easily and quickly find information on whether the “margin of error” is a standard error or a confidence interval or what, but generally when the polls are within the margin of error the media tends to report it as a “statistical tie” or dead heat. And that is exactly what they are saying in this case.
Nate Silver does a set of simulations – it sounds very complicated, but in essence I assume he takes his adjusted poll average for each candidate, some measure of spread like standard error, then runs a whole bunch of simulations. Which leads to results like this:
http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-2016/primary-forecast/iowa-democratic/
Based on this, Nate Silver gives Clinton an 80% chance of winning Iowa and Sanders only a 20% chance.
So what’s interesting is that you have the average of polls (48-43 or 47-44 depending on source), which everyone says is a statistical tie. You have Silver’s predicted result (50-43) based on a large number of simulations, and then you have the resulting odds considering both the predicted result and the spread in the predictions (80-20). In other words, the computer is generating random numbers and 80% of simulations end up favoring Clinton. Of course in real life the dice get rolled only once, but these odds seem pretty good for Clinton.
Meanwhile, the Trump-Cruz contest is similarly close in the polls (30-25 in favor of Trump), but the predicted result (26-25 in favor of Trump) and odds (48-41 in favor of Trump) are much closer. From a quick glance, this appears to be because the spreads are much wider. I don’t know why that would be the case – presence of more viable candidates on the Republican side? Or maybe there is just more variability in the polls and nobody actually knows why.
http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-2016/primary-forecast/iowa-republican/
You can require homeowners (actually home sellers) to fix sidewalks when they sell their property (“point of sale”). Los Angeles does this, which Donald Shoup says is a great idea. Philadelphia has a similar legal framework where the homeowner technically owns and is responsible for the sidewalk, but does not require point of sale repairs. The city can write you a ticket for a broken sidewalk if they want to, just like any other code violation, but that is not too often done because the public outcry would be pretty severe. Also, it’s the transportation agency that is supposed to do this and not the code enforcement agency, so may not fit clearly within their mission and priorities. One more interesting thing the article mentions is that if sidewalks were made more clearly a code violation, this would show up in real estate records, and there would then be some pressure from mortgage and insurance companies to fix them.
Another option, of course, would be for the city to take over the sidewalk, along with street trees and infrastructure up to the house line. This could be part of a grand vision for how to implement 21st century urban infrastructure – complete streets, better materials than tired old concrete and asphalt, urban forests, public spaces, modernized water, sewer, gas, electric, and communications infrastructure. I for one would be indifferent to paying slightly higher taxes rather than being ticketed for code violations for I have very little control over, and this would also be more equitable. But it’s easier for the politicians to pin in on the private owner and say it has “zero cost”.
Actually I’m not sure if I want this to be true or not, but
John Kasich has reasonable views on immigration.
Why wouldn’t I want this to be true? I’m not sure. I suppose because I don’t want to like any conservative governor after the awful one we just survived in Pennsylvania. In four short years he destroyed public education across the state, especially poorer urban areas, allowed gas companies to gut the environment, and did nothing to fix our state’s pension woes or entrenched poverty (either of which gas royalties could have at least made a dent in when energy prices were so high, but it’s a little late now.) Trading natural capital for financial capital, and restoring fiscal responsibility, are things a true conservative would do. About all he gave us was an entertaining pornography scandal. But I digress – if Kasich has a reasonable view on one issue, you have to admit it’s at least possible he might have reasonable views on other issues too. And I’m about ready to settle for reasonable with this crop of candidates.
Under the category of things you don’t want to be true,
According to Five Thirty Eight,
Three factors are required for a storm to be classified as a blizzard at a particular place, besides falling or blowing snow:
1. Sustained winds or frequent wind gusts of 35 mph or greater
2. Visibility under a quarter-mile
3. These conditions must persist for three hours.
This definition is the same whether you’ve got 1 inch or 40 on the ground.