Tag Archives: over-the-past

Proust and the Squid – Maryanne Wolf

by Myrna Posted on January 20, 2019

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Proust and the Squid

The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

Maryanne Wolf

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: August 1, 2017

Publisher: Harper Perennial

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


"Human beings were never born to read," writes Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and child development expert Maryanne Wolf. Reading is a human invention that reflects how the brain rearranges itself to learn something new. In this ambitious, provocative book, Wolf chronicles the remarkable journey of the reading brain not only over the past five thousand years, since writing began, but also over the course of a single child's life, showing in the process why children with dyslexia have reading difficulties and singular gifts. Lively, erudite, and rich with examples, Proust and the Squid asserts that the brain that examined the tiny clay tablets of the Sumerians was a very different brain from the one that is immersed in today's technology-driven literacy. The potential transformations in this changed reading brain, Wolf argues, have profound implications for every child and for the intellectual development of our species.

Source – 

Proust and the Squid – Maryanne Wolf

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Proust and the Squid – Maryanne Wolf

The FDA Has Revolutionized Drug Approvals Over the Past Decade

by roslynblanchard Posted on March 4, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I was reading something yesterday about President Trump’s desire to speed up FDA approvals for new drugs, so I decided to check: how long does FDA approval take these days? Here are the numbers over the past decade:

I’ve used a 3-year rolling average to smooth out the spikes, but the trend is pretty obvious. In the past ten years, the time to approve new drugs has been cut in half and the approval rate has tripled. Note that this is only for “standard” drugs, not “priority” drugs, so it’s not contaminated by special treatment given for certain lifesaving compounds.

I’m sympathetic to arguments that our narrow escape from the thalidomide disaster traumatized FDA scientists, and they overreacted by making approvals too hard. The problem is that the lesson of thalidomide approval in Europe isn’t that approvals were done too quickly, it’s that approvals shouldn’t be based on handwaving from pharmaceutical companies. As long as the testing regimen is rigorous enough, there’s no reason that approvals shouldn’t be done in a timely way.

That said, how much faster does Trump want approvals to go? A recent study suggests that the average FDA approval time is now considerably faster than Europe’s, and that “the vast majority” of new drugs were first approved for use in the United States:

If anything, the FDA may have become too aggressive. They’ve made some far-reaching reforms in only a decade. Ten years from now, the chart to look at will be a comparison of drug catastrophes before and after this change.1

1I don’t mean this in a snarky way. There’s no cosmic “right answer” for how fast new drugs should be approved. It’s all a matter of how much risk we’re willing to take vs. how long we’re willing to delay potentially effective therapies. A decade from now, we’ll need to look back and see just how much extra risk, if any, the FDA has introduced into the system.

Link: 

The FDA Has Revolutionized Drug Approvals Over the Past Decade

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The FDA Has Revolutionized Drug Approvals Over the Past Decade

Inflation Probably Won’t Be a Problem Until 2019

by CliffConde Posted on March 1, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Earlier today I noted that core PCE inflation—the measure used by the Fed—has been rising very, very slowly over the past two years. “At that rate, it should hit 2 percent by about 2019 or so,” I snarked.

But that got me curious. How fast is core PCE rising? So naturally I put it into a chart:

It turns out that by 2019 it would actually hit 2.2 percent at its current rate. This is still not something we should be very worried about.1

Of course, inflation isn’t just a trend independent of everything else. If the Fed changes interest rates, or President Trump balloons the deficit, or the dollar weakens and imports get a lot more expensive, then that will affect the inflation rate. But none of those things have happened yet, and until they do we still don’t really have anything to be worried about.

1In fact, it would probably be helpful to see inflation rise to 3 percent for a year or two. If it rises above that, then it’s might be time for the Fed to act.

Follow this link – 

Inflation Probably Won’t Be a Problem Until 2019

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Inflation Probably Won’t Be a Problem Until 2019

Map of the Day: Kansas Is Not Quite the Slowest Growth State in the Nation

by RodOlivares545 Posted on February 23, 2017

Mother Jones

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback slashed taxes when he took office five years ago, and since then the state’s economy has, for lack of a better word, sucked. The state legislature, which eagerly supported Brownback at first, has finally gotten tired of the obvious problems the tax cuts have produced, and tried this month to raise more revenue. It almost worked, but Brownback vetoed the bill and the state senate fell just short of overturning it. So the tax cuts stay in place for now, and the Kansas budget remains enormously in the hole.

Allow me to illustrate how this has worked out using my new favorite toy, GeoFRED. Here is employment growth over the past year:

Woot! Kansas isn’t in last place. It’s fourth from last. Here’s growth of gross state product in 2015 (the most recent year available):

Better! Kansas is 8th from last (counting Alaska, not shown). When the 2016 figures are available, maybe Kansas will move up to ninth or tenth from last.

There you have it. A picture is worth a thousand words, so that’s 2,000 words I’ve just saved you. You’re welcome.

Read the article: 

Map of the Day: Kansas Is Not Quite the Slowest Growth State in the Nation

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Map of the Day: Kansas Is Not Quite the Slowest Growth State in the Nation

Raw Data: Here’s What Violent Crime Really Looks Like Over the Past Decade

by TashaMathew Posted on February 12, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Donald Trump keeps saying that the murder rate is the highest it’s been in 45 years. This is wildly untrue, but other people are joining the bandwagon anyway. Jeff Sessions says the current rise in crime is a “dangerous permanent trend.” Talk show hosts agree. America is a dark and dangerous place, and it’s getting more dangerous all the time.

Aside from outright lies, a lot of this is based on cherry-picked statistics. The murder rate in Chicago has skyrocketed over the past three years. Los Angeles has seen a substantial rise in its violent crime rate. Etc. But if you’re interested in the whole picture, I have it for you below, complete and un-cherry-picked.

You’re all used to seeing long-term crime charts from me because I’m usually illustrating the effect of lead on crime over the past 50 or 60 years. Those charts show national crime rates plummeting in the 90s and early aughts. This time, though, the chatter is all about recent increases in murder and violent crime in big cities. For starters, then, here are the basic numbers for the past decade on violent crime in large cities from the National Crime Victimization Survey:1

The data goes through 2015,2 and shows that big-city violent crime did tick upward slightly in 2015. More generally, though, violent crime has displayed a noisy but steadily downward trend over the past decade. In 2015, violent crime in big cities was nearly a third lower than it was in 2007.

Next up is violent crime from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. This is based on reports from police departments, and includes detailed data at the city level. Here are violent crime rates in America’s ten biggest cities3 through the first half of 2016:4

Some big cities have indeed shown worrying upward trends: Chicago, San Antonio, and Los Angeles are all up over the past two or three years. At the same time, Philadelphia, New York City, and San Diego are all down. More generally, except for San Antonio every single one of these cities has a lower violent crime rate than in 2006, ranging from 4 percent down (San Jose) to 40 percent down (Dallas and Philadelphia). The overall violent crime rate for all big cities is up over the past two years, but still lower than it was in 2006.

Finally, here are the murder rates in our ten biggest cities:

Chicago, obviously, is a big outlier, with a high and rising murder rate (up 53 percent over the past two years). The three biggest cities in Texas have also seen big recent increases. Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and New York City are down compared to 2015.

You can draw different conclusions from this data depending on what you look at.5 However, this is the best data we have. This is reality. Whatever you decide to say about violent crime, it needs to be based on this.

1The NCVS data on violent crime doesn’t include homicide because, obviously, you can’t call up people and ask if they’ve been murdered in the past year. Generally speaking, however, violent crime as a category includes murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.

2Unlike the other charts in this post, this one starts in 2007 because the Bureau of Justice Statistics warns that a change in methodology in 2006 makes it difficult to compare 2006 to other years.

3Because of a dispute over methodology, Chicago has no official numbers for forcible rape before 2015. Because of this, it also has no official numbers for violent crime. However, it’s pretty easy to create a close estimate of the rape rate and then use that to recreate the violent crime rate. That’s what I’ve done here.

4I’ve annualized the rates for the first half of 2016 so they’re comparable to the other years.

5It’s worth mentioning that property crime is also down over the past decade. Ditto for crime in smaller cities and towns. I haven’t shown any of that here because big-city violent crime seems to be the topic of the moment. However, you might be interested in a little-known bit of crime trivia that will surprise most people: violent crime in big cities has fallen so much that it’s actually lower than anyplace else. The safest places in America are the biggest and smallest cities. It’s the medium-sized cities that now have the biggest violent crime problems.

See the original post – 

Raw Data: Here’s What Violent Crime Really Looks Like Over the Past Decade

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Raw Data: Here’s What Violent Crime Really Looks Like Over the Past Decade

On TV, Trump’s Inauguration Was the Worst in 40 Years

by JohnieBaugh490 Posted on January 22, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I guess we’ve moved on from crowd size at Trump’s inauguration to TV audience size. Interestingly, Trump has apparently decided not to lie about this, but only to mislead. Just for the record, then, here’s the share of the population that has tuned in to watch first-term inaugurations over the past 40 years:

Ratings here. January population here.

Continue at source: 

On TV, Trump’s Inauguration Was the Worst in 40 Years

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on On TV, Trump’s Inauguration Was the Worst in 40 Years

White Supremacist Sites Claim Their Traffic Is Booming. Actually, No.

by MaxwellIsrael Posted on November 23, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Has white supremacy gone mainstream? It certainly feels that way based on this week’s headlines, with leading so-called “alt-right” figures crowing about Trump’s victory on major news sites (including Mother Jones). The self-described alt-right “platform,” Breitbart News, claimed that its readership has doubled over the past eight months to 37 million unique visitors. And Trump’s choice of Breitbart chairman Stephen Bannon, nativist Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, and anti-Muslim Lt. General Michael T. Flynn for key leadership posts has given bigotry a seat in the Oval Office.

But here’s a reality check: Readership of actual white supremacist websites—by which I mean those that openly claim the racial superiority of whites—has actually changed very little over the past year. Here’s a chart of unique monthly visitors to the largest two such sites, provided to Mother Jones by the analytics firm comScore:

This is hardly the sort of growth one might expect if Americans were suddenly warming up to white supremacy. Traffic to Stormfront was lower last month than in October, 2015. The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi site founded in 2013, had too little traffic in many months even to meet comScore’s reportability thresholds. Though comScore’s traffic figures aren’t 100 percent reliable, they do suggest that the growth of these sites has been at best minimal over the past year.

Daily Stormer publisher Andrew Anglin told me in an email that his traffic had doubled over the past year to 4 million unique viewers, but did not respond when I confronted him with comScore’s dramatically lower figures. Anglin has claimed a rise in readers based on the notoriously unreliable Alexa rankings, but back in 2014, when Alexa showed a decline in Daily Stormer readers, he called Alexa “a complete joke which can never be taken seriously again.”

Breitbart also appears to be inflating its numbers. According to data collected by comScore, its traffic has increased over the past year from 13 million to 19 million unique viewers. That is still a dramatic rise, but it falls far short of the 37 million unique visitors that Breitbart claims. (A Breitbart spokesperson did respond to a request for comment).

There’s no doubt Breitbart has unleashed a miasma of racist rhetoric and ideas over the past year. In the week following the election, organizations that track hate crimes recorded the biggest spike in such incidents since the aftermath of 9/11. Among 10,000 Trump supporters sampled by an analytics firm in October, more than a third followed at least one white nationalist Twitter account. Trump’s denunciations of entire etnic groups, religions, and genders has had the effect of normalizing hate speech.

But white supremacy is still a step too far, even for Trump and his inner circle. Maybe they really do find neo-Nazis and the KKK abhorrent (if so, Trump certainly could have been swifter in denouncing them). Or maybe they’re just smart enough to know what any corporate marketer long ago figured out: When it comes to unvarnished white supremacy, nobody wants to hear it.

Source article: 

White Supremacist Sites Claim Their Traffic Is Booming. Actually, No.

Posted in bigo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on White Supremacist Sites Claim Their Traffic Is Booming. Actually, No.

The Mystery of Declining Labor Force Participation Continues

by AntonyNeuman Posted on November 18, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Tyler Cowen says there have been a lot of papers about the declining labor force participation of men, so it’s about time we investigate the declining labor force participation of women. He recommends a paper by So Kubota, a job market candidate at Princeton.

Unfortunately, I ran into a huge roadblock. Kubota thinks the answer involves the rising cost of childcare, and that certainly sounds reasonable. But take a look at the chart on the right. It comes at the very beginning of a presentation based on his paper. I’ve excerpted just the part starting around the year 2000, since that’s when overall female labor force participation started to decline. What it shows is clear: participation rates for women with children declined less than rates for women without children.

What am I missing here? It seems perfectly sensible that rising childcare costs reduce the net income from market labor and therefore reduce the number of mothers who find it worthwhile to work outside the home. And I’m fully willing to accept that the costs of childcare have gone up over the past couple of decades. That should make a difference, and Kubota estimates that it’s reduced female labor force participation by 5 percent. But Kubota’s own chart suggests that it hasn’t had this effect. All the subsequent discussion of subsidies and market vs. home-based childcare doesn’t change that basic fact.

So the interesting question seems to be this: given that childcare costs have increased, why are labor force participation rates for mothers declining less than those for women without children? That’s a genuine mystery.

This article is from – 

The Mystery of Declining Labor Force Participation Continues

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Mystery of Declining Labor Force Participation Continues

We’ll Have Self-Driving Cars By 2025

by Aaron Duff Posted on August 10, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Atrios takes to the podium once again to insist that self-driving cars are just a pipe dream of nerdy cultists:

If the driver has to pay attention it isn’t a self-driving car. And the self-driving cars are never going to happen (in my lifetime, yes, yes, one day our descendants might upload their brains into self-driving car bodies). Things which are a bit more self-driving but are really just cruise control plus will become more widespread and the technology will improve. They still won’t be self-driving cars….Maybe you’ll like your new toys, but they won’t be self-driving cars.

After reading several dozen similar posts over the past couple of years, I guess I’m curious: why is he so convinced that self-driving cars are impossible in our lifetime? I happen to be on the other side of this question, and since neither one of us is an expert in artificial intelligence I’ll offer up three non-expert reasons to think that self-driving cars will become a reality in the next decade or so:

Computing power, and AI in general, continues to improve rapidly. The progress in self-driving cars has been eye-popping over the past ten years. Why should the next ten years be any different?
And it’s not just AI. Enabling technologies—mapping, radar, machine vision, etc.—is getting better rapidly too. Keep in mind that cars aren’t limited to either the senses that humans use to drive a car or to the cognitive algorithms we use. They have additional technology that humans can’t make use of.
Lots of companies are spending a ton of money on this. If it were just Google, that would be one thing. But can a dozen auto manufacturers, mostly run by distinctly non-nerdy bean counters, all be so bedazzled by the technology that they’re wasting millions of dollars year after year chasing after a chimera?

If you want to say that five or ten years is too optimistic, fine. Maybe it’s more like 15 years. Or even 20. But 50? What’s the argument for thinking the technology is that far away?

Continued: 

We’ll Have Self-Driving Cars By 2025

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on We’ll Have Self-Driving Cars By 2025

Economic Anxiety Really Is (Part of) the Reason White Men Are So Pissed Off

by GreggLlewelyn99 Posted on August 1, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I don’t have any special news hook for this chart, but it’s been in the back of my mind for a while. Roughly speaking, it’s an answer to why white men are so angry about the economy even though they generally earn more than any other gender or ethnic group.

It’s all about progress. Women may earn 79 percent of what men earn, but over the past 40 years their incomes have increased rapidly. Black and Hispanic men haven’t done quite as well, but they’ve still made progress—and most people are relatively happy as long as things are getting better over time. The only group that has stagnated for four straight decades is white men. That’s plenty all by itself to make them angry, but it’s even worse when they watch literally everyone else doing better at the same time.

Don’t get me wrong: the “angry white guy” syndrome has plenty of sexist and racist overtones too. After all, white men used to be at the top of the gender/race heap, and now they aren’t. They don’t get to feel superior to women or blacks or Hispanics anymore, and their incomes have gone nowhere for four decades. Rightly or wrongly, you’d be mad too if this described you.

POSTSCRIPT: One reason I haven’t posted this before is because the data is hard to get. It’s easy for most groups—the Census data works fine—but for Hispanics the Census data is heavily skewed by the very low incomes of illegal immigrants, who have increased over time. As a proxy for income gains among Hispanic men who were born in America (to match the demographics of the other groups) I’ve used Pew’s estimate of the income difference between 1st and 2nd generation Hispanics. Obviously this is far from ideal, but I’m not aware of a clean source of comparable data for all this.

ALSO: Asian men and women have also seen substantial income gains over the past 40 years, but the Census figures for Asians don’t go back that far. That’s why they aren’t included in the chart.

Taken from:  

Economic Anxiety Really Is (Part of) the Reason White Men Are So Pissed Off

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Economic Anxiety Really Is (Part of) the Reason White Men Are So Pissed Off