Ben Schmidt

Hah, it could be a video game where you die if you hit a record highs starting in 1900 and it gets harder and harder as you go.

Not that anyone would be able to understand that at a glance! Just fun to have additional channels

Huh, and there's also two separate sets of *radiuses* you could use to encode -- from the circle that runs in the center of the torus that could encode hourly information, and also from the point in the middle of the donut hole.

You'd really want a moving average, but there's some way I'm sure that one could model spring mechanics to spread that change out over years.

I was sort of wondering if there's some way to use the tension of the spring -- the gap between the coils -- to encode year-to-year change? Like if it's warming stretch the spring out, if it's cooling compress it together

Don't need to animate -- that could just look like a spring if there's detailed hourly city time-series

🍩 What if climate looked like a donut? 🌍
Here’s a bunch of cities turned into a sweet dataviz experiment.

🟡 → comfy zone
🔴 → hot
🔵 → cold

Why a donut? Let me explain 👇

Junk line chart correlation purporting to show that Psychology is an outlier in low quality compared to the other social science.

I'll stay committed to the bit even if it doesn't work:

Yeah I shouldn't have put that in the title probably -- it's just the same joke about psychology being the worst discipline, but it doesn't really work there.

A chart "Change in degrees, 2014-2024", with increases for Statistics and Computer science, and steep drops for most humanities and humanistic social sciences.

Ten-year changes in majors by field -- when I first made this for the American Historical Association in 2018, history had the bottom slot, so slightly nice to see that it's rising.

Fortunately every person working in venture capital is a polymath with intellect of remarkable depth and breadth; otherwise I'd be in a real bind.

Yeah humanities are indexed against peak because they all went down and have a peak from 2000-2008, but doing that for social sciences doesn't really make sense when some are at peak today. TBH probably indexing against peak never made sense, but I've been making that chart that way for years now.

@pengzell.bsky.social asks about the social sciences, which I haven't looked at in a while. Indexing these against 2008 rather than peak, and struck that economics has been on a downslope for 6 years now, while psychology, the worst discipline, continues to rise rapidly.
bsky.app/profile/peng...

Should be able to make one, although the grouping might be off... let me see

Line charts showing annual trends for sixteen humanities disciplines.

Some more granular disciplinary data, by raw number of majors, showing the span since the 1990s. Most of the humanities are at about the same raw counts they were in the early 1990s. (And also the early 1970s, for that matter, although it's not in this chart because the data's harder to harmonize).

History had a tiny increase in share 2023, its first since before the Great Recession-- this year it's back down, but really the story is that three of the four biggest fields -- English, history, and foreign languages -- remain in almost the same band, all less than half what they were in the 2000s

A line chart captioned "The big humanities majors were mostly still falling in 2024", showing drops since 2008 for most humanities fields between 10% (Study of the Arts) to 68% (religion) with history, english, and foreign languages all clustered around 50-55%

Despite the gutting of the National Center for Educational Statistics, the dept of Ed *did* manage to release 2024 college major counts in the usual format, so I can run it through the same code I do every year. First off, the change since peak of the largest fields -- another year of drops.

Talking loss functions at the FOSS luncheon

"I was not sure if we would see any new data coming out any time soon, so this is a good sign. But looking under the hood, there are clear signs that they’re struggling to do the same quality of data collection and posting as they have in the past,” said Robert Kelchen, head of the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Department at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, who flagged some of the issues in a Bluesky thread. “I worry about the ability to continue to get data out on time, especially with the changes to the proposed new admissions survey, which is going to be a massive data collection effort.”

I shared some thoughts with @insidehighered.com about the first IPEDS data release since the Department of Education got DOGE-d. It's good to see the data coming out, but there are some concerns now and plenty more going forward.

www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

Headed to Brazil for the first time next month. I've got a pretty meager frame of reference. Any reading recommendations (fiction or non-fiction)?

OTOH can’t wait to do some regressions across income by college major, finally about to normalize by creed and cranial size.

Including a requirement that hires and students be reported to the federal government by “color” - not ethnicity, “color” - is really bringing the race science all the way back to the nadir.

This to me is the stronger case here -- seems quite plausible to me that chatbots end up leading to a *decrease* in suicide rates compared to, say, Reddit or Dostoevsky, because they make it harder to solicit pro-suicide feedback.

The ‘Werther Effect’ of Goethe’s Werther: Anecdotal Evidence in Historical News Reports Anecdotal evidence suggests a spike in suicides occurred after the publication of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774. Imitation suicides elicited by media portrayals of suicide have sinc...

Yeah I've been thinking about Werther a lot. My assumption has been is that Werther *did* lead to more suicides--do you know differently @tedunderwood.me? This article here cited in wikipedia is a little disappointing; just digs up some 19C copycats. www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/...

Open access now! dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/computa...

Photo of old black and white printed placards on a black surface, advertising a town hall on January 4,1980

Photo of many different scraps of old placards on a black background, mostly political, some involving protests against the atgemtine government at the YN.

They’re cleaning up at the Herald Square station and briefly scraped the place back into December 1979. Hard for me to imagine living in such a two-tone world.

differences in usages of super-common words ('of', 'on', etc) but this is a case where nowadays you could definitely not try to be rigorous and instead just have an llm prune the list.

I used to sometimes do this at the end of semester for all my students' blackboard posts -- what words do you overuse.

The challenge is getting it to focus on non-specific words (e.g. I'm not mortified is someone points I use 'humanities' too much). Old-school stylometry focuses more on…

Google's Gemini AI tells a Redditor it's 'cautiously optimistic' about fixing a coding bug, fails repeatedly, calls itself an embarrassment to 'all possible and impossible universes' before repeating 'I am a disgrace' 86 times in succession

I'll admit, I was skeptical when they said Gemini was just like a bunch of PhDs. But I gotta admit they nailed it.

Not fair I, like *many* PhDs would take this question as an opportunity to recite a wishlist of zoning reforms, protected bike lane plans, and ADU incentivization plans completely disconnected from the current political reality.