I have a busy week with an invited talk to give at a regional math meeting and some other time pressures. I don’t expect to post next Tuesday, and Quick Takes may be a little shorter than usual. In other words, a bit of a slowdown for a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I’d love some feedback. What have you liked? What should I do more of? What should I do less of? What have I done well? What not so well? Please leave a note in the comments (no comments will hurt my feelings 😊).
Graph of the week
This comes from the IMF article Fewer High School Seniors See Marriage in Their Future (4/11/2024), which actually comes from this paper (3/26/2024).
What really got my attention here is what happened about 10 years ago: both men and women’s perceptions of being very good spouses started to decline. Smart phones and social media? Maybe Haidt will have something to say at After Babel at some point.
Climate adaptation
The global camel population has doubled over the last 20 years, something the U.N. agency for agriculture and investment attributes partly to the animal’s suitability amid climate change. In times of hardship, camels produce more milk than cows.
Many cite an adage: The cow is the first animal to die in a drought; the camel is the last.
This is from the Washington Post article (4/17/2024) The Survivor Species: Having lost many of their cattle, traditional herders are trying out a milk-producing animal that is more resilient to climate change. I’ll also note that Nature Climate Change is also starting to talk about adaptation in the article Effective climate action must integrate climate adaptation and mitigation (3/19/2024).
Climate actions at the international, national, regional and local levels have historically been driven by efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, with adaptation often lagging. But global temperatures in 2023 have already increased by 1.35 °C above the 1850–1900 pre-industrial average1 with no signs of slowing down, as efforts to speedily and ambitiously reduce greenhouse gas emissions have failed2. Even if global ambitions for net zero by 2050 are achieved, the world will continue to warm, weather extremes will continue to worsen, and adaptation will be required to protect people from the worst impacts of the changing climate. Separating mitigation and adaptation actions could lead to imbalanced development and slow progress on effective climate action.
This is sensible.
China and oil
The eia reports in China imported record amounts of crude oil in 2023 (4/16/2024)
China, the world’s largest importer of crude oil, imported 11.3 million barrels per day (b/d) of crude oil in 2023, 10% more than in 2022, according to China customs data.
This isn’t a real surprise, but the chart of where China gets its oil from and who went up and down over the last year is interesting.
I know I sound repetitive but does anyone really think that countries that have oil to sell won’t find buyers? Russia (GDP per capita $15,270, U.S. $76,239) and Malaysia (GDP per capita $11,993), for example, aren’t rich countries, and oil revenues are important to them.
From the gardens
Trout lilies are a really neat, ephemeral spring flower. When we moved here, we had lots of foliage but no flowers. Once we fenced off some sections of the woods, we eventually started getting flowers. Now we have a great spring bloom. Deer eat everything. Also, more daffodils, scilla, and marsh marigolds are starting.
Gender parity
S&P Global is in a panic over gender parity, as reported in Elusive Parity: Key Gender Parity Metric Falls for First Time in 2 Decades (3/8/2024):
The growth in women’s representation among senior corporate positions, once a bright spot for gender parity, potentially faces an alarming turning point. Exponential growth over a decade is showing signs of losing momentum. Growth no longer appears exponential. A waning focus on diversity initiatives suggests a potential inflection point and calls our previous gender parity estimates into question.
I have some issues here.
Exponential growth? This is stupid. There is no evidence that there has ever been exponential growth over the last decade. The growth rate was roughly the same (dark blue bars) in 2014, 2025, 2019, and 2020, while it was lower in 2016, 2017, and 2018, and higher in only 2021 and 2022. Roughly, the growth rate over the last decade has been about constant. What type of growth has a constant growth rate? Linear. I wish journalists would take a calculus class. Also, the growth cannot be exponential forever since women’s representation can’t go past 100%. At some point, growth has to stop.
Wait, you say, 2021 and 2022 were higher than 2019 and 2020, which were higher than 2017 and 2018. Doesn’t that look exponential? Well, we’d have to ignore the two-year pattern, but even then, the jumps were about 0.25 points. In other words, constant jumps, and so maybe the growth rate was quadratic every two years. (Too math-geeky?) This also isn’t a decade.
More importantly, we need to examine the assumption that we should expect parity. I realize it is not in vogue to suggest that men and women are different, but they are. I note in Quick Takes (3/28/2024) the pew survey where women were less interested in working weekends and 50+ hour work weeks. This is a strong indicator of gender differences and suggests that women may be less interested in C-suite positions. There is nothing wrong with this, and it may be a smart choice.
Why exactly is this an “alarming turning point?” Not every unequal representation is a problem or needs to be fixed. The perspective bias of the writers comes out loud and clear.
Lastly, this is a one-year downturn, so it isn’t a trend. The representation of women in C-suite positions went down a little less than 0.5% as opposed to up, say 0.5%, which is more than the mean for the last decade. Right now, this is just noise.
I’ll continue to contend that the panic-type narrative the journalists push is at least partially why they aren’t trusted.
Data center report
I know—a weird obsession of mine. Just the headline Microsoft acquires another 136 acres outside Atlanta, Georgia (4/17/2024)
The spinning CD
New from Pearl Jam.
Please share and like
Please help me find readers by forwarding this article to your friends (and even those who aren't your friends), sharing this post on social media, and clicking like. If you're on Twitter, you can find me at BriefedByData. If you have any article ideas, feedback, or other views, please email me at briefedbydata@substack.com.
Thank you
In a crowded media market, it's hard to get people to read your work. I have a long way to go and I want to say thank you to everyone who has helped me find and attract subscribers.
Disagreeing and using comments
I'd rather know the truth and understand the world than always be right. I'm not writing to upset or antagonize anyone on purpose, though I guess that could happen. I welcome dissent and disagreement in the comments. We all should be forced to articulate our viewpoints and change our minds when we need to, but we should also know that we can respectfully disagree and move on. So, if you think something said is wrong or misrepresented, then please share your viewpoint in the comments.