Category Archives: Online Tools / Apps / Data Sources

Peter Turchin has a new book

His new book is called End Times but it does not appear to be about the apocalypse, but about a cyclical view of political history with some evidence to back it up.

When a state, such as the United States, has stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt, these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. In the United States, all of these factors started to turn in an ominous direction in the 1970s. The data pointed to the years around 2020 when the confluence of these trends was expected to trigger a spike in political instability.

Peter Turchin

I haven’t read the book, but I have officially added it to my queue of too-many-books-to-read-before-I die. (I’m not terminally ill that I know of, it’s just a long and growing list.) The queue is periodically randomized, so just because it already has too many books to read before I die does not mean I will never read this particular book.

Anyway, one disturbing implication just from the brief description above is that we may not be able to educate our society out of economic inequality. That seems to go against the data which clearly show that people with more education earn more than people with less education. So it’s a case where a dynamic model leads to a different, counterintuitive conclusion compared to a linear extrapolation of data from the recent past.

more on Philadelphia crime

The Philadelphia District Attorney has come under pressure for a drop in violent crime convictions. I generally support efforts to reduce arrests and trials for non-violent crimes, although a lot more tickets need to be written for speeding and reckless driving in the city – not doing this is killing people, both drivers and pedestrians, at alarming rates, and I don’t know how you can call this “non-violent”.

Nonetheless, the statistics on violent crime convictions do look somewhat bad, and the downward trend started before the 2020 pandemic so you can’t blame it on that alone. I like the data transparency that the District Attorney’s office provides. This, along with police data, could allow journalists to provide a lot more context on individual cases and short-term statistics than they do. I think they could do this without giving up the blood-soaked entertainment value that seems to be necessary to pay the bills in our messed up society.

Our World in Data Global Health Explorer

Our World in Data has a new Global Health Explorer. I’m going to pick a few metrics and see where the United States stands according to a somewhat random set of peer countries. I think it would be interesting to see where we stand as a percentile among OECD and non-OECD countries, but that would require work.

Peer countries: I’m going to pick six highly developed countries and six middle income countries: Canada, Germany, Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia.

I’m going to pick 10 metrics.

  • Life expectancy at birth: We’re #4! (Japan, Canada, Germany, US, Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia)
  • Child mortality: We’re #4! (Japan, Germany, Canada, US, Malaysia, Brazil, Indonesia)
  • Maternal mortality: We’re #4: (Japan, Germany, Canada, US, Malaysia, Brazil, Indonesia)
  • Homicide rate: We’re #6! (Japan, Germany, Indonesia, Canada, Malaysia, US, Brazil)
  • Deaths from road injuries (rate): We’re #4! (Germany, Japan, Canada, US, Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia)
  • Suicide rate: We’re #6! (Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, US, Japan)
  • Death rate from all infectious diseases: We’re #2! (Canada, United States, Germany, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan)
  • Death rate from alcohol use: We’re #5! (Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Canada, US, Brazil, Germany)
  • Death rate from drug use: We’re #7! (Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Brazil, Germany, Canada, US)
  • Death rate from cardiovascular disease: We’re #6! (Brazil, Malaysia, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, United States, Germany)

There’s a lot more to glean from the graphs in terms of how much separates countries in these metrics, and of course there are many more metric and many more countries. But one thing is clear, USA USA! is not #1. And in this peer group of highly developed countries (Canada, Germany, Japan), we are not even average, we are dead last on most metrics. Asian countries tend to beat western countries on metrics related to life style, such as alcohol and drug use, and are significantly less violent. Germans are no saints when it comes to healthy life style – they drink a lot and have a lot of heart attacks. And Brazil is downright violent.

Living Planet Report 2022

WWF’s Living Planet Report is out. They mean this at least in part as a report card on the UN’s “Decade on Biodiversity”, and the grade is a failing one. A few things caught my eye:

  • They have a discussion of “connectivity conservation”, which is intended to reduce fragmentation by connecting protected areas.
  • They determined there is an average 69% global decline in abundance of monitored vertebrate populations between 1970 and 2018. The situation in the tropics is much worse than this average.
  • Populations of corals and sharks in particular are crashing.
  • The “Amazon as we know it” may cease to exist in less than a decade.
  • They give an update on the global ecological footprint from the “National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, 2022 edition”. Maybe I’ll have a more detailed look at this another day. The value they give is in hectares per person and I find it hard to interpret given that the population is not constant. They seem most interested in showing that people in more developed countries are using more than their fair share of the planet’s “biocapacity”. Previously, I understood the unit to be the number of planet Earths needed to sustain humanity’s current level of consumption and waste production long-term. A value less than 1 would be sustainable long term, while a value greater than 1 indicates a drawdown of natural capital, creating a debt that will eventually come due.

Audubon native garden designs

For people like me with limited artistic sense (visual anyway, and you don’t want me to dance in public, although I was once upon a time a well-trained and active musician), these visual garden designs from Audubon are helpful. Basically, you put the tall plants and flowers in the middle and shorter ones more toward the edges, I think, and then you can consider colors and timing of the flowers. Easy to think about, harder to do.

identifying birds by their songs

This is pretty cool – basically, something called “Haikubox” is a microphone that records bird songs around your house and sends them to a computer at Cornell, which identifies them and sends them back to an app on your phone that tells you what is going on. My immediate reaction was do I really need to buy this high tech microphone? Couldn’t I just make recordings with whatever I have lying around and send those to the computer? And yes, there is an app for that too called “Merlin Bird ID”. I guess the advantage of buying the hardware is that it is always on and processing and transmitting the recordings without extra effort from you.

new CDC mask guidance

In my coronavirus trackers and simulations revisited post, I have updated the CDC link o their new “COVID-19 by County” page based on guidance issued Friday, February 26 (it’s 2022 in case you are an anthropologist reading this thousands of years in the future.) The updated recommendation is to mask indoors if new cases in your county are 200,000 per 100,000 population per week, AND if the number of people entering the hospital and/or in the hospital is above certain thresholds. It’s a little hard to find the data and figure out yourself, so if you trust the CDC (and who wouldn’t?) you can just type in your county and they will tell you if it is high/medium/low. My home county of Philadelphia is in the medium category, indicating we don’t need to mask indoors, but the city will be slow to react and the school district will be even slower if they react at all.