Signing Off Until Late June

Interesting as the world is (to me at least), I really have to focus on studying until after my big test. Thanks for reading. Until then: whatever you're up to, make sure that you're making yourself and others happy, and really make sure you have actual evidence that's what's happening!

Spot the Difference, or Political Multiple Choice

Time for some political multiple choice. Pick A or B:

"...[former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin/FBI Director Robert Mueller] said s/he's 'all for' profiling [Muslims/conservatives] if it saves 'innocent American lives.'

"Speaking about the [Fort Hood shooting/Tucson shooting], s/he said there were 'massive warning flags that were missed all over the place' because of a 'fear of being politically incorrect.'"

Which do you think it was? If these are not equivalent, why not?

Obesity and the Bad Stripe

Maps here. Obesity splits into two bands in the eastern U.S.; one is the Bad Stripe and one is the Black Belt. I originally noticed the Bad Stripe when it shifted more Republican for president in the 2008 election (the opposite of the rest of the country) and then when the same shape continued to appear in maps of other indicators. My initial surprise about the Bad Stripe is that it was not the Black Belt, which can be clearly seen on the obesity map.

"Chavez Squeezes Scientific Freedom"

To the rallying cries of "Let's be more like West Virginia!" and "Let's be more like North Korea!", we might add "Let's be more like Venezuela!" The headline above is from Nature. (Scientists have noticed Chavez doing other questionable things before.) While Eric Cantor is not yet in Chavez territory, it's worth it (and fair) to ask him directly if he would like to be.

Assorted Links: Transparency and War

1) I Paid a Bribe, a bribe-tracking site with a focus on South India. Has anyone ever estimated the damage that the prevalence of bribes in South Asia does to economies? Also check out the zero rupee note and Transparency International. Future project: multiple regression for happiness indices against factors including transparency (if not already done).

2) Supposedly the 90s were more violent, and the narrative was that the end of the Cold War freed up more national interests to fight without touching off World War III. Turns out violence has decreased steadily since WWII (including in the 90s), and the tail end of Stephen Pinker's observation of a six-century decline is mirrored in this graph. There were however more non-governmental conflicts. This is an interesting development; growth of non-governmental warfare ironically only possible in a wealthier world? There has not been any post-colonial fighting since the 70s, and France was involved in the most international conflicts since WWII. (Really.)

Electoral District Reform: Give Seats Directly to the Special Interests

A post at opensecret.org described the outcome of the 2012 Congressional elective"Transportation unions lost three seats...And the mining industry gained two new seats." Many states and Congressional districts are transparently dominated by one or a very few industries. So why don't we cut to the chase? Why don't we have legislators that represent labor unions and mineral extraction interests right on their name tags, instead of pretending to represent New Jersey or Wyoming?

Big Five Personality Traits, Outliers and Per Capita Income in the U.S.

I went back and played with the data from that survey of Big Five personality traits by state (the OCEAN traits) and the NYT has a neat gadget; data below from there. Per capita income data comes from the Census. Automatically you start thinking about correlations between the Big Five and other things like income.


- Big Five traits and per capita income.
- Interestingly the strongest correlation at the state level both in terms of goodness of fit and slope (strength of influence) in a linear model is an inverse one with conscientiousness. Want to make money? Be lazy! Who knows the causal relationship here if any, so I won't hand-wave. With an R^2 of 0.2646, the regression says the state's per capita rises $236.87 for every rank lower you go on the conscientiousness scale. You also get money for being disagreeable ($221.87 for every rank the state drops, R^2 = 0.2321), although you also get money for being open-minded ($182, R^2=0.1566). This is probably largely the Northeast talking, although it might be interesting to look at the correlation between education and openness.

- Combinations of Big Five traits by state. If you do scatterplots with each of the Big Five characteristics against the others, several states appear repeatedly as outliers at the "corners" of the scatter - DC is one and Alaska is another. The whole reason that the study which initially generated this data is interesting is because it shows that there actually is a geographical difference in personality types (whether that's because of memes or genes is another question entirely). But it stands to reason that if gene and/or culture flow can explain this, then we should see outliers at the geographical extremities. It also stands to reason that the outliers on the coasts won't necessarily be outliers in the same way. While the map of openness does bear a similarity to the Red/Blue presidential voting distribution, there is no other obvious correlation between other characteristics or states.

So I looked at the coastal states (those with a saltwater port) against the non-coastal states, excluding Hawaii and Alaska. If geographic extremes correlate with personality type "outliers", then the saltwater states (which are farther from each other) should also be more dissimilar to each other than the interior states. By my count there are 26 interior and 23 saltwater states, so all other things being equal, the saltwater states should look more similar to each other, since there are fewer of them.

Indeed, the standard deviations for 3 of the 5 big 5 are smaller for the interior. They're the same for the other 2. As far as the averages, the interior states are more extraverted, agreeable and conscientious than the coastal states. (Those first two are consistently a shock to me.) The noncoastal states are on average less neurotic and less open to new experiences and ideas.

- Combinations of Big Five traits by region. If you do scatterplots with combinations of Big Five scores by region, then the Northeast (DC to Maine) is frequently an outlier (conscientiousness vs neurotic, conscientiousness vs openness, consciousness vs extraversion; more on this in a bit). The contiguous Pacific states are a major outlier on agreeableness vs openness; otherwise they land near the other states in and west of the Rockies. The Frontier Strip lands with the Midwest and the Bad Stripe tends to sort with the South, except that it's much less open than other Southern states.

- Per capita income distribution and average, coastal vs. non-coastal. It's also worth pointing out that the per capita incomes of non-coastal states were a) more similar to each other than the coastal states' were and b) on average lower, by $5,128. This is not surprising, as land-locked countries also have lower per capitas than those with coastline. 2/3 of all Alpha and Beta cities are on saltwater (or a river delta leading into saltwater), so, par for the course.