This post is related to NPR’s Planet Money’s podcast “Episode 472: The One-Page Plan To Fix Global Warming“. In the podcast, Alex Blumberg and David Kestenbaum describe their approach to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the chief cause of global warming. Their one step approach is to tax emissions. It’s an interesting podcast, well worth the …
Time and tide wait for no one. Add to that: earthquakes. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, a.k.a. “earthquake country”, in a house built in the 1950s before earthquake building codes had been created. Within the next 30 years, the USGS tells us we can expect a “big one” in the East Bay …
I was chatting with my Dad recently and he brought up a debate he’d heard on the radio between a Republican and Democratic candidate. The Republican candidate said that in our present-day recession economy, Republican states were better off than Democratic states. My Dad seemed to particularly relish how the Democratic candidate scrambled to defend his …
Here’s an interesting relationship. The graph shows the percentage Republicans in the states Lower Legislatures versus the Upper Legislatures. It would appear that if you’re a Republican, you have the best chances of winning an election in the lower house in states where the upper house is split. You will have a hard time in …
Thanks to Google’s ngrams project page I have wasted my scarce spare hours looking at micro trends in literature. A couple of months ago, the Google ngrams project presented a database of all the words from Google’s extensive book collection. Making the books freely available presents copyright issues, but a database of word frequency in …
Starting a decade ago more and more schools across the US began implementing data mining programs to improve school performance. It was claimed that data-mining real-time and after the school year had ended could identify students who were in danger of not graduating. Real-time data mining would be a way to find these students early …
