Construction Physics has done a deep dive on US pedestrian fatality numbers. I really appreciate data-based articles like this. I think the answer to the question in their headline, “Why are so many pedestrians killed by cars in the US?”, is that our street and road designs are about 50 years out of date compared to best practice elsewhere in the world, and auto-oil-highway industry propaganda hides this fact from us and encourages us to blame the victims. They don’t really talk much about this in the article. But the article focuses on a slightly different question, which is why have fatalities increased significantly over the last 15 years or so? They look at the evidence for the “SUV hypothesis”, increases in drinking and drug use among both drivers and pedestrians, and distracted driving due to cell phones. The evidence seems to support the SUV hypothesis best, and this makes sense to me.
Category Archives: Online Tools / Apps / Data Sources
the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test
Results of this international comparative test show worldwide drops over the past 20 years, with accelerations since the pandemic. We should note the scale of the graphic, yet the trend is clear. Poverty, distracting devices, and mental health are offered as potential explanations. East Asian countries and city-states do best in math, and the United States sits a bit below the average. Our close cultural cousins the UK and Canada do notably well, while Australia sits just a hair below the average. It’s interesting that the worst performing students in the US seem to do better than the worst performing students elsewhere. Could this be because of the things we actually do right, like get kids to (a) school regardless of income and give them some calories while they are there?
bibliometric analysis
Here is some R code and detailed explanation on how to thoroughly explore keywords within an academic field, in this case ecology.
Project 2025 Tracker
Anonymous parties have put together a Project 2025 Tracker. They pulled out and listed all the individual policy recommendations in the document, and are trying to track which are complete, in progress, or not started. As I write, they put the agenda at 42% complete.
I would break the recommendations down into three categories: (1) Christian/White Nationalism, (2) Homophobia, and (3) Rich and Powerful/Big Business Giveaways.
methane tipping point watch
Here is an interactive chart of greenhouse gas concentrations from the World Meteorological Organization. It does look to me like there has been an acceleration in methane concentrations since around 2020.
house sale price premiums by month and city
Zillow has some data on how much above average home prices are by month of the year and by US city. In general, prices are higher by about 1-3% in March-June. I assume this has something to do with the U.S. school year. It may be somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy though. Last time I was in the home buying market, which was almost exactly 10 years ago, I started looking for listings in January, but there really was nothing to look at until March. So people in my city (Philadelphia) don’t start listing until March, and by the time you go through the process it seems like most closings are going to be in the May-June time frame (precisely when mine was). I wonder if refinancings show up as home sales in this data though, or if they have some way of knowing when the properties actually change hands. That could skew the data because people can refinance any time of year, and they are likely to refinance when interest rates are relatively low and prices therefore relatively high.
weather forecasting
This is interesting. It is not 100% clear to me what the measure of accuracy is below, but the plot shows how much weather forecasting has improved over the last 50 years or so. A 3-5 day forecast is highly accurate now, and 3-5 are not that different. It’s interesting to me that there is such as large drop off in accuracy between a 7 and 10 day forecast – that is not necessarily intuitive, but useful even in everyday life. A 10-day forecast is basically a coin flip, while check back 3 days later and you are closer to 80/20 odds. This is based on pressure measured at a certain height I think, so it doesn’t necessarily mean forecasts of precipitation depth and intensity, rain vs. snow vs. ice, thunder and lightning, tornadoes, etc. are going to be as accurate as this implies.
There is some suggesting that AI (meaning purely statistical approaches, or AI choosing any blend of statistics and physics it wants?) might make forecasting much faster, cheaper, and easier yet again.
native wildflowers from bulbs
For something random and different (but hey, it’s meteorological spring right?), here are some wildflowers native to the U.S. that can be grown from bulbs.
- Blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium atlanticum), native to eastern North America
- Calochortus spp. lily, native to western NA
- Dwarf-crested iris (Iris cristata), native to eastern NA
- Fritillaria spp., native to western NA
- large camas (Camassia leichtlinii), native to western NA
- Nodding onion (Allium cernuum), native throughout US
- Northern spiderlilly (Hymenocallis occidentalis var. occidentalis), southeastern US
- Rain lily (Zephyranthes atamasca), southeastern US
- trout lily (Erythronium americanum), central and eastern US
- Turk’s cap lily (Lilium superbum), central and eastern US
- Ookow (Dichelostemma congestum), western NA
- Wood lily (Lilium philadelphicum), throughout NA
It’s nice to grow plants from seed for genetic variety, but bulbs certainly have their place. It’s good to know there are good native choices (well, I don’t know if these are choices down at my local Lowes/Home Depot, but they should be).
those darn recipe sites
This is some seriously dark humor. But ha ha, also so true. You have to scroll forever to get to your recipe, and at least for me the mobile version of any recipe site is infuriating because it constantly crashes. And yet…what is also true is recipe websites have made our world better. Instead of winging a recipe, or relying on one book you happen to have lying around, you can find out the ingredients, measurements, and even watch a video of how to make it well. You can even look at several versions of a dish, then wing it, and it will usually come out pretty well. And if you wing it in the future, it will come out better than if the recipe sites did not exist. So thank you, recipe sites.
most popular R books of 2023
Here is something useful (to me, personally, and maybe too others), and thankfully not too pessimistic or morally fraught.
A Crash Course in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) using R – yes, please! We must end the tyranny of the monopolistic Environmental Systems “Research Institute”. Okay, they make some nice products, but just admit you are a rapacious for-profit corporation, please!
A ggplot2 Tutorial for Beautiful Plotting in R – Who doesn’t need to improve their data visualization and communication game?