Category: Informative

Traffic fatalities

NewMexiKen read many years ago that traffic fatalities were not particularly more significant on holiday weekends than any other days. Safety advocates just had us all thinking they were with their public service advertising campaigns and police check points.

A new study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety confirms this. For the period 1986 through 2002 there were an average of 117 traffic fatalities a day in the United States. And, while July 4 was the worst day of the year with an average of 161 fatalities, 158 people were killed on any given Saturday. July 4 is the only date in the year less safe than any Saturday.

The worst dates:
July 4 — 161
July 3 — 149
December 23 — 145
August 3 — 142
January 1 — 142

Days of the week:
Sunday — 132
Monday — 96
Tuesday — 95
Wednesday — 98
Thursday — 105
Friday — 133
Saturday — 158

Of course, maybe the holidays remain relatively safe because of all the attention placed on them.

Source: The New York Times

Best and worst

J.D. Power has released its latest survey of automobile dependability. For the tenth consecutive year Lexus lead the list; Buick, Infiniti, Lincoln and Cadillac were second through fifth. The five worst were Volkswagen, Isuzu, Daewoo, Kia and Land Rover (with 472 problems per 100 vehicles).

Toyota, Honda, Porsche, GM and BMW were the best manufacturers, and the only manufacturers better than average.

The survey was based on 2001 models.

The Smithsonian Institution

Zoom zoom

The L.A. Times’ Dan Neil on the 2005 Ford GT —

The launch sequence goes like this: Raise the revs to about 4,000 rpm, slot the shifter into first gear and slip your left foot off the clutch pedal. The foot-wide rear tires squall briefly and then hook up. The carbon-fiber seat mule kicks you in the backside. The supercharger trills like a teakettle. One second or so later, the landscape goes all spin-art and you start looking like Keir Dullea at the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Cue “Thus Spake Zarathustra.”

Because of the way the car is geared, you will cross the 60-mph threshold well before you need to shift to second. By the time you start stretching in fourth gear (about 150 mph), the car’s aerodynamic underbody is producing several hundred pounds of ground-hugging down-force that actually causes the car to settle an inch-and-a-half on its suspension. The old race cars — which were the first to exceed 200 mph at Le Mans — didn’t have ground effects devices and were legendarily unstable on the Mulsannes straight. The new GT tracks like a Japanese bullet train.

Please keep your hands and feet inside the ride.

He goes on to say, “Think of it this way: If the Corvette is whiskey, the GT is a turkey baster full of heroin with a rubber-hammer chaser.”

Dog Demonstrates Human Language Skills

From Discovery News:

Language skills once thought exclusively human are also within the reach of dogs, say German researchers studying a nine-year-old border collie that has a 200-word vocabulary. …

In a game where Rico is told to fetch an unfamiliar object with a name he hasn’t heard before, Rico runs into a room where the new object is on the floor among several familiar objects, of which he already knows the names. Rico reliably figures out that the new word must go with the new object in a single try. Then, after a month of not seeing the new object or hearing the new word, he remembers them.

What’s scary is that he’s 9, which means 63 in human terms, right? I’m younger than that and I can go into a room and forget what I went into it for.

One more thing on genealogy

Steve Olson is the author of The Royal We, an article in The Atlantic in May 2002, which claims: “The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that everyone in the world is descended from Nefertiti and Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne.”

Who’s your daddy?

According to Steve Olson, Mapping Human History, “Medical students are taught that 5 to 10 percent of the fathers identified on birth certificates are not the true biological fathers.” Genetic studies confirm this number. “[N]onpaternity tends to be higher for first-born and last-born children.”

Think of the lines

“Adding up the numbers, approximately 81 billion modern humans have lived altogether. For every person alive today, twelve have died. If people really go to heaven after death, then the afterworld is a crowded place.”

Steve Olson, Mapping Human History

Mapping Human History

NewMexiKen spent this afternoon reading Steve Olson’s Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past through Our Genes (2002). The book is informative and interesting, though it gives the vague impression of articles strung together. Some items of interest:

Every single one of the 6 billion people on the planet today is descended from the small group of anatomically modern humans who once lived in eastern Africa. The group occasionally came close to extinction, but it never died out completely, and eventually it began to expand. By about 100,000 years ago, modern humans had moved north along the Nile Valley and across the Sinai Peninsula into the Middle East. More than 60,000 years ago they made their way along the coastlines of India and southeastern Asia and sailed to Australia. About 40,000 years ago, modern humans moved from northeastern Africa into Europe and from southeastern Asia into eastern Asia. Finally, sometime more than 10,000 years ago, they made their way along a wide plain joining Siberia and Alaska and spread down the length of North and South America. (Page 3)

In comparing the DNA sequences of people from many locations around the world, geneticists have been able to measure the genetic differences between individuals and between groups. What they have found is that about 85 percent of the total amount of genetic variation in humans occurs within groups and only 15 percent between groups. In other words, most genetic variants occur in all human populations. Geneticists have to look hard to find variants concentrated in specific groups.

The pattern is quite different in other large mammals. Among elephants of eastern and southern Africa, 40 percent of the total genetic differences occurs between groups. For the gray wolves of North America, group differences account for 75 percent of the total genetic variation. Most conservation biologists hold that group genetic differences have to exceed 25 to 30 percent for a single species to divided into subspecies or races. By this measure, human races do not exist. (Page 63)

Beware the kiddie pool

From an article in The New York Times:

I asked Dr. Sordillo how much people should really worry about swimming. She said, “I personally don’t let my children swim in public pools.”

I should add that Dr. Beach did emphasize that swimming was very good exercise.

“I hope,” he said, “that we don’t scare people off.”

On the other hand, if they are not somewhat scared, they won’t be careful – a difficult line to walk.

The Political Compass

The Political Compass uses six pages of questions (3-5 minutes) to evaluate your political/economic attitudes and place you on a four-dimensional chart. It’s interesting, and more thoughtful and thorough than most of these things. As the authors point out: “The old one-dimensional categories of ‘right’ and ‘left’, established for the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly of 1789, are overly simplistic for today’s complex political landscape.”

NewMexiKen is proud to report that I was positioned somewhere in the territory of Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama.

Also take a look at their Iconochasms. Your heroes may surprise you, as mine did me somewhat.

Thanks to Byron and Jill for the pointer.

If I wanted to make a difference in kids’ lives

Erin O’Connor at Critical Mass (commentary on the state of American academe) has some thoughts on leaving Penn to teach at a small boarding school. Her thoughts on the current state of education resonated with NewMexiKen, so I pass some of them along.

I’ve been teaching college since 1991. Along the line, I’ve stopped feeling that I can do the sort of teaching I want to do in a university setting. Too many people arrive at college–even a place like Penn–without solid reading and writing skills. And once they are there, it’s almost guaranteed that they won’t acquire them. Their educations are too unstructured, there is too little continuity with individual professors and too little coordination among professors, there are too few professors who will take the time to work closely with students to help them develop and improve their skills. I noticed that the best students were ones who brought their skills with them to college, while the weaker ones were those who had been done a disservice in K-12. I noticed, too, that most people turned a blind eye on this realization, and taught their classes as if their students were far more prepared than they were. I noticed that they inflated grades to cover this up, and that they groused among one another–utterly unselfconscious about the fact that as teachers they have a responsibility to, you know, teach–about how students these days just aren’t very smart. I realized that there was not much I could do in such a setting to change things, and that if I wanted to make a difference in kids’ lives, I needed to encounter them when they were younger. My leaving academe is certainly in part a gesture of disgust at the corruption I’ve documented endlessly on Critical Mass. But, far more elementally, it is an attempt to put myself in an educational setting where I can actually do some solid, lasting good.

Interesting, very interesting

From Marginal Revolution, the Politically Incorrect Paper of the Month, v.2

Less than three percent of the highest-paid U.S. executives are women. Why? In Performance in Competitive Environments: Gender Differences, a new paper in the Aug. 2003 QJE, the authors suggest an intriguing answer.

The authors compare male and female performance at solving mazes across different incentive systems. In a simple piece-rate system men perform slightly but not markedly better than women, on average the men solved 11.23 mazes in 15 minutes compared to 9.73 for the women, a difference of 1.5. But in a tournament, in which only the highest-paid performer wins, the men significantly improve their performance and the women hardly improve at all. As a result, the gender-gap in performance rises (men complete 15 mazes, the women only 10.8 for a difference of 4.2, stat. significant at p=0.034).

Now here is where it gets really interesting. One might think that this shows that women are less competitive than men. To test this the authors run single-sex tournaments. Surprisingly, in the single-sex tournaments the women’s performance improves considerably relative to both their performance in the piece rate system and to their performance in the mixed tournament. Women do like to compete just not against men! Men’s performance stays about the same as in the mixed tournament.

The discussion continues, including [gasp] a graph.

One is unique, two is too many

Dan Neil is at it again in the Los Angeles Times, One is unique, two is too many. Neil takes a look at the Chevy SSR (Super Sport Roadster). He begins:

The most lucid thing the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin ever wrote is the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” written in 1936, during an apparent dry spell in Berlin’s hashish supply.

Benjamin’s famous essay, a staple of film-lit classes, puts a dope-scented finger on a central issue in aesthetics: If the art object is special — if it has an authenticity, an “aura,” Benjamin calls it — what is the status of the duplicate, the mechanically reproduced copy?

“That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art,” says Benjamin. Reproduction “substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.”

In other words: The first David by Michelangelo is art, the second is a lawn ornament.

Continue with Dan Neil’s column.

Biere de Mars

Colorado Luis says:

Let me recommend hurrying out to the liquor store and grabbing a six pack of New Belgium’s Biere de Mars ale before they replace it with Loft, their summer seasonal offering. … If you like Fat Tire and think you might like something a bit more adventurous, give Biere de Mars a try before the stores run out of it.

OK, I think I will, because I do like Fat Tire.

USA

Understanding USA is a web site devoted to graphic statistical analysis of the U.S. It’s very informative, but exceptionally difficult to use. For one, the images are two small and much of the information is undecipherable. It is the source, however, for the map in the post that preceded this one (below) and for what follows. (In turn, Understanding USA cites the Census Bureau as its source.)

Education

    Out of every 1,000 Americans

  • 114 have no high school diploma
  • 325 have a high school diploma
  • 47 have an associate’s degree
  • 102 have a bachelor’s degree
  • 50 have an advanced degree
  • 362 are two young to count (under age 25)

Employment

    Out of every 1,000 Americans

  • 377 are not in the labor pool (mostly children)
  • 114 are retired
  • 25 are unemployed
  • 484 are employed

Marriage

    Out of every 1,000 Americans

  • 269 are too young to marry
  • 436 are married
  • 72 are divorced
  • 51 are widows or widowers
  • 172 have never been married

Voting

    Out of every 1,000 Americans

  • 269 are too young to vote
  • 249 are not registered to vote
  • 86 are registered to vote but did not
  • 396 voted

Best academic speaker

Crooked Timber has a post on Who is the greatest (living?) academic speaker?. NewMexiKen hasn’t heard of most of the people discussed (mostly in the comments), but still thought this an interesting topic. Perhaps we can start our own dialogue here.

Two come to mind. Ten years ago I heard a presentation by Otto Kroeger on the Myers-Briggs personality types that had the group crying and laughing (mostly in self-awareness) simultaneously. He was as interesting, informative and amusing as any I can remember.

It seems to me that author/linguist Deborah Tannen was wonderful at a lecture I attended at the Potomac School when her You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation was a current topic. She had the audience, which was about 500 women and ten men, pretty well engaged as I remember it.

Archivist of the U.S.

From a White House release:

The President intends to nominate Allen Weinstein, of Maryland, to be Archivist of the United States. Dr. Weinstein currently works at the International Foundation for Elections Systems as Senior Advisor for Democratic Institutions and Director of its Center for Democratic Initiatives. He previously served as President of The Center for Democracy in Washington, D.C. Earlier in his career, Dr. Weinstein was a Professor at Boston University, Georgetown University and Smith College. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Columbia College and his master’s and Ph.D. from Yale University.