QTRS Nov 7, 2024

Graphs and interesting content for the curious

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Ramblings about “Election Stress”

I try to avoid editorializing on the site, but today I'd want to comment on the tone of this election. The Time article, Stressed About the Election? Here's Where to Find Help (10/25/2024) illustrates the types of emails circulated on campus regarding how to deal with or process the election. I don't want to disregard people's anxieties and concerns, but I do hope that at some point in the future, the grownups in the room, if there are any, will reflect on the doommongering. It is not productive and not helping young people, college students, and, when this attitude spreads to newsrooms, society as a whole. Prior to the election, I did not believe the United States would end as we know it, regardless of who was president.

We need to tone down the rhetoric and perhaps adopt a little stoicism. I'm hoping that the educated class, particularly academics who take pride in teaching critical thinking and reflection, will do some of it for themselves and make an honest effort to understand why their party lost the election. It would help them.

This is related to my personal frustration on campus. I'm in my 24th year at Ithaca College, and over the last 5-10 years, I've been either more aware of or more annoyed by the elitism. As someone who is now referred to as a "first gen" (a term I despise) and whose father was a firefighter who also drove a school bus for extra money, I may have been oblivious of the elitism on campus at first.

I recall around ten years ago when the switch was flipped off. It was when I learned that we were going to condense finals week into four days rather than the customary five, because having finals on December 23 was unacceptable. Students may not arrive home for the holidays until late on the 24th, while faculty will be working close to Christmas. This was clear evidence that schooling was not that important. I mean, why not do finals in just 4 days? Students don’t have to study or something, do they? Meanwhile, faculty working so close to Christmas was unreasonable, and all I could think about was how my father always worked a portion of Christmas day. Working-class individuals do not have these days off, nor do they get more than a week off between Christmas and New Year's. Our lives as professors aren't so difficult, and it wouldn't kill us to work the 23rd of December every now and again. My awareness, or lack of patience with the elitism on campus, has grown since then.

Well, I’m sure I just made some more friends on campus. I'd love to hear thoughts in the comments. Now let's get back to data and graphs.

Freshman enrollment declines

Brookings reports on first-year enrollment declines in their article Fewer freshmen enrolled in college this year following troubling FAFSA cycle (10/28/2024). To their credit, they are trying to decide if or how much the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) debacle is the cause for declining first-year enrollment. I’m skeptical that it was much more than small. Two points.

GAO estimates overall applications are down three percent overall compared to last year, with large variation by student type. Filing is down nine percent for first-time applicants (such as high school seniors) but only one percent for continuing college students.

Returning students, those more motivated to stay in college perhaps, filings were down only 1%. I would argue that this 1% were more than likely not returning anyway. Now, students coming out of high school have no experience with FAFSA, and so one might argue that they would just deal with it as is. The 9% decline in this group seems to me to be more than just FAFSA was messed up. We’ll see how much this changes in this cycle.

My second point is related to this graph. Students that apply to highly selective colleges would, to me, be much less affected by FAFSA issues, typically have more family money, and the selective colleges have more money to give in financial aid. Given this, I might argue that the decline there has more to do with students not wanting to go to college than FAFSA. That 6% decline might be closer to a baseline decline; beyond that, the other schools declines might be more FAFSA-related. Either way, any college that is blaming FAFSA for all of their freshman declines is being a bit delusional.

Kudos to Brookings for noting that changes in affirmative action likely have little to do with enrollment declines: “... it seems unlikely the Court’s ruling is a major driver of those schools’ enrollment declines.”

Scaling law for speed

I find scaling laws really interesting and here is a report on one from Predictive musculoskeletal simulations reveal the mechanistic link between speed, posture and energetics among extant mammals (10/4/2024), summed up nicely with this graph. GRF: ground reaction force.

My loose interpretation here is based on graphs D and E. GRF, basically the ability to push off the ground to generate speed. In graph E, the bigger we are, the larger GRF; more muscle and better leverage as we get bigger. But as we get bigger, there is a price to pay for moving a bigger body around, and graph D shows this as optimized at 52.8 kg or 116.4 lbs. Here is what they say:

Speed at smaller body sizes appears limited by the ability to stay on the ground long enough to produce higher ground reaction forces, while speed at larger body sizes is limited by the ability of the muscular system to produce forces.

Note this is all for an average person. Elite sprinters are different.

For example, elite sprinters have longer toes and smaller Achilles tendon moment arms³³ as well as a predominance of fast-twitch (type II) fibres in their leg muscles³⁴—adaptations that are all suggested to increase running speed. Simulations have also demonstrated that maximum running speed is sensitive to the shape of the force-velocity relationship of skeletal muscle³⁵. Here, we have altered just one morphological feature, muscle strength, and it is likely that top speeds in elite sprinters are achieved via a complex combination of morphological, physiological, and genetic factors.

Male vs. female differences

It is important to understand the health difference between males and females. Here is one example from the paper Sex Differences in Cardiovascular Outcomes in Patients With Kidney Failure (5/3/2024).

The general idea is that even though the survival probably of males and females is different after the start of dialysis when we look at all types of death (A) there is much more of a difference when we look at just cardiovascular deaths (B). Both are statistically significant.

The difference in the all‐cause mortality in men and women was driven by higher mortality rates from infections and dialysis withdrawal in the first 5 years after dialysis initiation.

With a high risk of cardiovascular events and premature menopause in women with kidney failure, we would anticipate higher cardiovascular mortality in women, but we did not observe this in our study. In fact, when we tested for the interaction between sex and cardiovascular event, cardiovascular event accentuated the risk of both all‐cause mortality and cardiovascular mortality in men.

Marriage by partisanship

There are clear cultural differences by partisanship. One clear one is marriage, as seen in this chart from the IFS (10/31/2024).

Not only has the marriage gap grown, marriage rates have increased for Republicans over the last few years when they haven’t for Democrat’s and Independents. There are other charts in the article where they look at different subgroups, but these gaps remain regardless of age, education, and sex. Further, they are more happy with their marriages.

Again, this gap exists for both college-educated and not-college-educated groups. I find this observation of their concerning:

Indeed, a big reason that the Democratic Party has backed away from the institution of marriage is that many of its most devoted supporters are single, left-leaning women. Another reason is that marriage and family life are increasingly coded as Republican issues.

Are we really so partisan that we’ll now see marriage as a Republican thing, and so if you are a Democrat, you won’t get married? Yeesh. It is an article worth reading.

Renewable demo city needed

Hat tip to Doomberg (11/4/2024) for pointing me to the article We Must Demand A Demonstration Project Of A Mainly Renewables-Based Electrical Grid (2/8/2023). Two quotes.

The internet is filled with seemingly authoritative voices asserting with complete confidence that wind and solar generators are the answer to providing consumers with cheaper electricity.

No amount of pointing to the failed experiments of places like Germany, the UK and California seems to get any traction. We need to demand a working demonstration project of a fully wind/solar system so that the full costs can be shown for all to see.

In order to run a city on fully renewable energy, wind and solar, you need a massive backup system, say batteries, to make it work. There is the question of how much backup you need, but regardless, this drastically increases the cost. If not batteries, you still need fossil fuel generation. As Doomberg also quotes:

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why the costs explode. They can build thousands of wind turbines and solar panels, but they can’t get rid of any of the dispatchable power plants because they are all needed for backup. So now they are paying for two duplicative systems. Then they must pay the dispatchable plants enough to cover their capital costs at half time usage. Then they must buy the fossil fuels for backup on spot markets where production has been suppressed by, for example, banning fracking.

I think the call for a demonstration project of some kind, say a small city, makes a whole lot of sense. Prove you can run a small city on solar and wind reliably and let us see the actual costs.

Climate change isn’t important to voters

Robert Bryce does some of the best reporting on energy, and in Who Really Cares About Climate Change?, he highlights voters rejections of restricting fossil fuel use.

In Berkeley, one of the most liberal cities in America, Initiative GG, which would have levied a massive tax on buildings that use natural gas, was rejected by a whopping margin of 69 to 31. Recall that in 2019, Berkeley became the first city in the US to ban new natural gas connections.

If Berkeley doesn’t favor restricting natural gas use, then what city will?

The measure repeals provisions of a state law that was designed to force Puget Sound Energy to speed up its transition away from natural gas. The initiative, which was backed by a host of business groups, prohibits cities and counties from barring or penalizing the use of gas in homes and businesses. It passed by a margin of 51 to 49, or about 60,000 votes. Again, context is essential. A majority of voters in Washington said they want to keep using natural gas. At the same time, they voted for Harris over Trump by a margin of 58 to 39.

Even Democrat-leaning states won’t vote to reduce natural gas use. One more

Last year, a survey by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago found that just 38% of Americans were willing to pay $1 per month to pay for climate change policies and only 21% were will to pay $100 per month.

There are more examples in Bryce’s piece that are worth reading. I’ll keep saying it: we want our energy, we want more of it, and we want it cheap. We will keep burning fossil fuels, and the climate will warm. Our energy should be focused on adaptation.

The spinning CD

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Please point out if you think something was expressed wrongly or misinterpreted. 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.