Category Archives: Online Tools / Apps / Data Sources

models for movement and population ecology

This page has links to some academic/professional models of movement ecology and population ecology, such as predator-prey interactions. It’s something that interests me because with an accurate theory of how animals and plants function and interact in ecosystems over time, it should in principle be possible to design networks of urban, industrial, and agricultural areas that maximize ecological function.

Developing this knowledge would be step one. Of course, there would still be the small matter of our civilization deciding this is something it would like to do.

apps for splitting bills

This Learnvest article mentions a few apps for splitting bills that I hadn’t heard of.

  • Splitwise: If your group is taking turns covering expenses (“you get this dinner; I’ll get the next”), track them with Splitwise. This app keeps a running total of who’s covered what, so you can settle the difference at the end via Venmo or PayPal.
  • Billr: Perfect for large parties, this app lets you split a bill with up to 16 people so each person pays for what they ordered, plus their portion of any shared items, tax and tip. You can also send each person a copy of the split bill in a text or email.
  • Divvy: Snap a photo of your bill and drag each item to the appropriate person (uploaded through your contacts) and Divvy will automatically add up what each person owes, plus tax and tip.

U.S. life expectancy down again

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has released statistics on life expectancy and causes of death for 2016. Some interesting findings:

  • Overall average life expectancy fell by 0.1 year, from 78.7 to 78.6 years.
  • The average masks the finding that for women, life expectancy held steady at 81.1 years while for men, it decreased by 0.2 years from 76.3 to 76.1 years.
  • Deaths from disease were down in almost every category. The increases come from “unintentional injury” and suicide. Unintentional injury sounds like car accidents and falling off a ladder, and it does include those things. But dig a little bit and it includes “poisoning”, and poisoning in turn includes drug overdose.

The Guardian explains that life expectancy has fallen two years in a row and how unusual that is:

Drug overdoses killed 63,600 Americans in 2016, an increase of 21% over the previous year, researchers at the National Center for Health Statistics found.

Americans can now expect to live 78.6 years, a decrease of 0.1 years. The US last experienced two years’ decline in a row in 1963, during the height of the tobacco epidemic and amid a wave of flu.

“We do occasionally see a one-year dip, even that doesn’t happen that often, but two years in a row is quite striking,” said Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch with the National Center for Health Statistics. “And the key driver of that is the increase in drug overdose mortality.”

The article goes on to explain that the last time we saw three years of decline was during the Spanish flu epidemic 100 years ago.

Comparing any two years could easily be a statistical blip, as any climate science denier could tell you. But it seems clear that over time the U.S. is losing ground to its peers in the developed world. The solution our elected politicians have identified, of course, is to take away health care and mental health coverage from the working class.

browser extensions to get cheaper stuff

This blog is not about how to get more stuff. It’s not about how to get cheaper stuff. For the most part, I am almost totally against stuff and the idea that life is about getting more of it.

But there is in fact some stuff I need and even some I want. So I might occasionally mention a story about browser extensions that help us get more stuff cheaper. But we have to be disciplined! Just because we can get cheaper stuff does not mean we should get more of it. Try to get used stuff if you can, and try to get rid of some when you get some new stuff. But if there is a thing you are absolutely going to buy new, no matter what, whether you have any of these browser extensions are not, then go ahead and see if they will help you get it cheaper.

SDG Index and Dashboards Report 2017

The UN has released an update on the Sustainable Development Goals. I find the number of indicators a bit bewildering. It is interesting to dig into some of the thresholds and methods behind the indicators, and to see how individual countries score. I wonder though if countries are really using these metrics to guide their planning and policy decisions. I wonder if something a bit simpler (not simpler to compile, but simpler to interpret) like a GDP adjustment or ecological footprint would work better. If every country were in the “good” range for all these metrics, do we really know that the world would be sustainable in an absolute sense, meaning not exceeding the limits of our planet? These indicators instead seem to rank countries against each other, taking the countries doing the best in each category as the model for all the others. I wonder if the best the world currently has to offer is really the best we can aspire to in every category. Well, this is an academic question when there is clearly such a gap between the best and the worst, or even the best and the average. And I wonder if we will be patting ourselves on the back in the future because some percentage of countries met some percentage of these goals.