This is a Google Slides experiment. I’ve come up with a summer financial and economic literacy thing for kids. It’s easy to find basic financial literacy content, but my idea here is to link those ideas to concepts like time value of money, endogenous growth, and ecological economics in a way that is accessible to an elementary to middle school audience. And honestly, an intelligent but unaware adult audience, because I don’t think most adults have a conceptual understanding of these concepts. It is a test of my own conceptual understanding if I can explain them clearly to children. This has been a challenge, and I am certainly happy to hear feedback on my attempt.
McKinsey has a post with a data visualization on industries it predicted in 2022 would be growing quickly by now (May 2026 as I write), versus how they actually turned out. I find it interesting both for the industries/technologies themselves and for which are overperforming and underperforming. Overperforming ones include, of course, “AI software and services” and semiconductors. Robotics, however, has not kept up with expectations at least in terms of widespread commercialization (I think it is still coming, just behind schedule). Electric vehicles are also both high-growth and overperforming, while “shared autonomous vehicles” are high growth and were not considered in the original study due to “negligible baseline revenue” – more evidence that in the U.S. we are being duped as this combination of technologies explodes globally. Interestingly, batteries have not kept up with expectations as a high-growth, profitable industry/investment even though we know the technology itself has seen massive improvements in cost-efficiency. Biotechnology is a mixed bag – “obesity drugs” have exploded while “non-medical biotechnology” has seen no growth in the profitable investment sense. The holy grail of turbocharging construction productivity by making it more like manufacturing (“modular construction”) is about 50 years behind schedule. Maybe the robots can help with this eventually. And finally, even with all our fossil fuel woes the nuclear energy industry never seems able to capitalize, probably because of its long lead times and public risk-aversion on this particular technology.
My big picture analysis – technological progress is slow and steady, but when it comes to which will “hit” in a widespread profitable commercialization/investment sense, it is hard to identify the needles in the haystack at least in any sense of precise timing. In a personal investing sense, you can either gamble and go for broke, or you can diversify and be patient. In a broader economic sense, governments can use policy to try to give a particular industry a nudge, but there is a gambling aspect to this too, and my view is they would be better off focusing on reducing economic friction (great infrastructure, ease of starting a business, predictability, level playing field in terms of taxes and regulation) while protecting the environment and workers. Maybe provide childcare, health care, and education so people can start a business without worrying about those things, and have healthy skilled workers available when they do.
There probably is no “one stop shop” for exploratory data analysis. I’d like to see some plots myself – box plots, cumulative distributions, time series – and why not put all those side by side with the relevant summary statistics? But still, this is a nice entry.
The describe() function from R’s psych package (Revelle, 2023) provides a comprehensive statistical summary of your dataset. Unlike R’s base summary() function, it includes additional metrics that are particularly useful for data exploration and assumption checking.
All this works best for data points you assume are independent of each other in time and space, which is not how the actual universe tends to work. And heah, I know there is a thing called machine learning, but I like to start simple to begin building a picture of a data set in my simple human brain.
The use of bibliometrics is gradually extending to all disciplines. It is particularly suitable for science mapping at a time when the emphasis on empirical contributions is producing voluminous, fragmented, and controversial research streams. Science mapping is complex and unwieldly because it is multi-step and frequently requires numerous and diverse software tools, which are not all necessarily freeware. Although automated workflows that integrate these software tools into an organized data flow are emerging, in this paper we propose a unique open-source tool, designed by the authors, called bibliometrix, for performing comprehensive science mapping analysis. bibliometrix supports a recommended workflow to perform bibliometric analyses. As it is programmed in R, the proposed tool is flexible and can be rapidly upgraded and integrated with other statistical R-packages. It is therefore useful in a constantly changing science such as bibliometrics.
Planetizen has a nice post on city-building games other than SimCity. I’m looking for a birthday gift for a kid who loves Minecraft and is interested enough in science to maybe add a little more hard sci-fi into the mix. The kid of mention is super smart and just not a reader – believe me, I’ve tried. I feel a little guilty giving kids these days more screen-based stuff, but then again I figure birthdays and Christmas are when you give them the things they want that you feel just a little guilty about.
Anyway, two games that are mentioned are Surviving Mars and Aven Colony, both space colony building games, the first looking like pretty hard science and the second more fantasy. These are both on Steam which we already have. From a little more research, Satisfactory is a less serious game but people seem to love it. So I have a bit more thinking to do and a choice to make.
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.
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?
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.
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.
