QTRS March 20, 2025
Graphs and interesting content for the curious
A plea: My stats tell me a fair number of people visit Briefed by Data that aren’t subscribers. If you are one of these people, first, thank you for stopping by, but please subscribe. You can subscribe for free, and it helps me. It is also easy to unsubscribe too. So, please, click the button.
As I see it…
About a month ago I posted What higher ed can learn from baseball (2/25/2205), and interestingly, yesterday The Athletic published the article Inside the mind of David Stearns: How the Mets exec learned to be ‘dangerous’ (this is behind a paywall but worth the read if you can access it), which further made my point. Here are some examples:
“I am probably even more inclined to action now as I have gone throughout my career,” Stearns said. “I have gotten to the point where I would rather make mistakes of commission rather than mistakes of omission.”
If higher education is good at anything, it is inaction. The time it takes to make any change might be measured in decades. This is built into the system. Faculty will generally only engage in service or governance during the semester, at which time they are preoccupied with teaching. Hence, only so much gets done. They then don’t engage in service or governance during the summer, which basically halts all initiatives. When fall returns, we essentially restart from the beginning, often with new committee members. Basically, it is impossible to take action on much.
“Or I look at it from even a management philosophy, even conversations I didn’t have. Things like that, where, you know, man, I wish I’d had that conversation two weeks ago rather than having to have it now.
My experience is there is a lot of hope that problems will resolve themselves. The idea that conversations should happen, let alone should have happened earlier before, say, problems get worse, is nonexistent.
“That’s a big part of plotting future strategy, is determining your own internal belief system about how the league, in general, is going to price certain player attributes.”
The analogy to me here is trying to understand the market in the future. For higher education, this means thinking about programs that might emerge as important in the future or predicting changing attitudes of perspective students. Some of the problems in higher education are due to decades of complacency and no future strategies.
As I see it, I’d hire Starns to run a college despite no background or experience in higher education because of the way he thinks and reflects and looks to improve. You can’t be complacent running a sports team, and higher education needs more thinkers like that, as I imagine many other industries could use.
On to some data.
Standardized test
NBER papers are behind a paywall, but the abstracts are informative. This is from Standardized Test Scores and Academic Performance at Ivy-Plus Colleges (March 2025). Bold mine.
We analyze admissions and transcript records for students at multiple Ivy-Plus colleges to study the relationship between standardized (SAT/ACT) test scores, high school GPA, and first-year college grades. Standardized test scores predict academic outcomes with a normalized slope four times greater than that from high school GPA, all conditional on students’ race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Standardized test scores also exhibit no calibration bias, as they do not underpredict college performance for students from less advantaged backgrounds. Collectively these results suggest that standardized test scores provide important information to measure applicants’ academic preparation that is not available elsewhere in the application file.
This is not a surprise. The California system reviewed the SAT years ago and found it was the best predictive measure of college success. Colleges stopped using the SATs for a few reasons, one of them, which isn’t talked about much, was to increase the number of applicants so they could decrease their acceptance rate to appear more selective.
Egg gouging?
Food and Water Watch has a report, As Egg Prices Soar, New Report Details How Corporations Exploit Bird Flu Crisis For Profit (3/4/2025), suggesting price gouging on eggs. Here is the key graph. Basically, egg production has changed little over the last year while prices have about doubled. Meanwhile, in 2022-2023:
National egg prices spiked while production barely dipped: Average retail prices for eggs in the U.S. jumped 150% from January 2022 to January 2023, reaching $4.82 per dozen, even as monthly egg production never fell more than 7% from the 5-year average.
The importance of marriage and dads
The AEI article Progressives Are Starting to Come Around on the Importance of Marriage and Fatherhood (3/17/2025) has this graph that is astonishing. Except for intact families, young men are more likely to spend time in jail than to graduate from college.
Now, let’s make the connection some people don’t want to make. I used this graph in my post, Why is there a racial wealth gap? (1/16/2024) This isn’t causation but maybe it explains some of the homicide difference in my post on Tuesday Homicides and Suicides by Age (3/18/2025).
A fun map
This comes from the LOC post Unconventional Theories about the Earth’s Shape: Both Ancient and Modern (3/19/2025).
In 1893, an American professor named Orlando Ferguson created the Map of the Square and Stationary Earth. Professor Ferguson based his beliefs on a biblical passage which describes four angels standing at the corners of the Earth.
On birds
Bird numbers are on the decline, as reported by the State of the Birds Report United States of America (2025). Here is the key graph.
Million-person counties
The Census Bureau has put together a really nice interactive graphics page, Million-Person Counties: 1970-2024 (3/13/2025). Here is the map of the location of the 50 million or more person counties. On the page, you can scroll over the map to get individual county information.
Data center update
Crusoe secures 4.5GW of natural gas power for AI data centers (3/17/2025)
The AI data center developer has entered into a joint venture with San Francisco investment firm Engine No. 1 which will see it gain access to power generated by seven turbines built by GE Vernova, which were purchased by Engine No. 1 and Chevron earlier this year. The turbines will produce up to 4.5GW, and the JV is getting access to their entire output.
The turbines will circumvent the grid and deliver power directly to "large scale data center campuses" which Crusoe will build at as yet undetermined locations across US. The energy supply is likely to be in place by 2027.
I’m not sure how this all plays out with these companies having energy generated directly for them, but it seems worth paying attention to.
The spinning CD
Please share and like
Sharing and liking posts attracts new readers and boosts algorithm performance. I appreciate everything you do to support Briefed by Data.
Comments
Please let me know if you believe I expressed something incorrectly or misinterpreted the data. I'd rather know the truth and understand the world than be correct. I welcome comments and disagreement. We should all be forced to express our opinions and change our minds, but we should also know how to respectfully disagree and move on. Send me article ideas, feedback, or other thoughts at briefedbydata@substack.com.
Bio
I am a tenured mathematics professor at Ithaca College (PhD Math: Stochastic Processes, MS Applied Statistics, MS Math, BS Math, BS Exercise Science), and I consider myself an accidental academic (opinions are my own). I'm a gardener, drummer, rower, runner, inline skater, 46er, and R user. I’ve written the textbooks “R for College Mathematics and Statistics” and “Applied Calculus with R.” I welcome any collaborations. I welcome any collaborations.