Quick takes and random stuff, January 4, 2028
Paper recycling, detecting T/F statement, data centers, a non-racist criminal justice system, sanity on climate change, and more
Chart of the week
This comes from the paper Paper and cardboard waste in the United States: Geographic, market, and energy assessment (April 2024—this will be the print date).
This is nicely done and needs very little explaining, which is a plus. There are other charts in the paper, and here is the conclusion:
The aim of this study is to clarify where and how much paper and cardboard waste is available in the United States to inform decision making and technology deployment. We quantify and map landfilled paper and cardboard waste, and we estimate the market and energy value of these materials. Our study indicates that a large quantity of paper and cardboard waste is landfilled in the United States—more than is estimated in frequently cited sources—representing significant market and energy losses to the U.S. economy in 2019.
Detecting true and false statements
This is one of the two key charts in the paper: Democrats are better than Republicans at discerning true and false news but do not have better metacognitive awareness (12/18/2023). In the chart, d is “discernment ability.” In more detail,
We first sought to examine participants’ ability to discriminate between true and false statements and how this varied with partisanship, age, education, and gender. Overall group accuracy was 78.9% for facts and 81.3% for false statements, producing an average d’ of 1.82.
The b panel in this chart is the first part of the title. There seem to be some interesting interactions here. In general, Republican’s are older and more male, and both those groups have higher d’ scores individually. I think it would be interesting to see further breakdowns here. The statement of age in the paper is:
Turning to age, we conducted a one-way ordinal ANOVA with age group as a factor (18–32, 33–47, 48–62, 63+) on d’ values. This revealed a significant main effect (F(3, 496) = 2.72; p = 0.044; MSE = 0.38; ηp2 = 0.02), illustrating that discernment ability differed with age.
The statement for gender is
To examine gender differences in d’ scores, we conducted an independent samples t-test and found that men in our sample had higher d’ values than women (t(496) = 4.20, p < 0.001, 95% CI = [0.123, 0.338], Cohen’s d = 0.38).
I did find this surprising (does this justify mansplaining?—yes, this is a joke), whereas age was not that surprising. The other surprising result, or maybe not, is that those with 4-year degrees didn’t do better than those with 2-year degrees. This could use more research as to why.
More data centers, more energy
In Microsoft wants to acquire 200+ acres in Hebron and Union Township, Ohio (1/2/2024), we learn that this “Will bring company's total landholdings in Licking County close to 1,000 acres” and
According to Hebron's outgoing Mayor Jim Layton, Microsoft intends to develop six data center buildings on the parcels, each with between 50 and 75 employees and phased over around 10 years.
Data centers use a lot of energy. For example (6/8/2023),
According to a report released by Forbes back in 2017, data centers based in the United States alone utilized more than 90 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity that year. That much energy would require 34 massive coal-powered plants to generate at least 500 megawatts each to meet the power demands of said data centers. However, this figure pales compared to the amount of power needed to run data centers on a global scale, which amounts to 416 terawatts, or approximately 3% of all electricity generated on Earth. That is already a massive amount of power, and with the number of data centers in operation growing each year, power demands are only increasing as time goes on.
I keep bringing this up as a good example of our increasing demand for energy. It isn’t just that we want to move to wind and solar for our current energy needs; we also need to meet increasing demand. This is a tall order that will take longer than climate activists will acknowledge.
Is the U.S. criminal justice system biased?
From the abstract of Race, class, and criminal adjudication: Is the US criminal justice system as biased as is often assumed? A meta-analytic review (12/23/2023):
Specifically, there is concern that Black and Latino defendants as well as poorer defendants receive harsher sentences than Whites or Asians or wealthier defendants. We tested this in a meta-analytic review of 51 studies including 120 effect sizes. Several databases in psychology, criminal justice and medicine were searched for relevant articles. Overall results suggested that neither class nor race biases for criminal adjudications for either violent or property crimes could be reliably detected. For all crimes, effect sizes (in terms of r) for Black vs White comparisons were.054, for Latinos vs Whites, 0.057 and for Asians vs Whites −0.028. There was significant heterogeneity between studies, particularly for Asian vs White comparisons. Effect sizes were smaller than our evidentiary threshold, indicating they are indistinguishable from statistical noise. For drug crimes, evidentiary standards were met, although effect sizes were very small. Better quality studies were less likely to produce results supportive of disparities. Studies with citation bias produced higher effect sizes than did studies without citation bias suggesting that researcher expectancy effects may be driving some outcomes in this field, resulting in an overestimation of true effects. Taken together, these results do not support beliefs that the US criminal justice system is systemically biased at current. Negativity bias and the overinterpretation of statistically significant “noise” from large sample studies appear to have allowed the perception or bias to be maintained among scholars, despite a weak evidentiary base.
Cool video
I’m going to include this in the next classroom connection, but it is also worthy of being here. This is a great 13 minutes, and it has a companion article in Quanta.
The ability of the phenomenon of criticality to explain the sudden emergence of new properties in complex systems has fascinated scientists in recent decades. When systems are balanced at their “critical point,” small changes in individual units can trigger outsized events, just as falling pebbles can start an avalanche. That abrupt shift in behavior describes the phase changes of water from ice to liquid to gas, but it’s also relevant to many other situations, from flocks of starlings on the wing to stock market crashes. In the 1990s, the physicist Per Bak and other scientists suggested that the brain might be operating near its own critical point. Ever since then, neuroscientists have been searching for evidence of fractal patterns and power laws at work in the brain’s networks of neurons. What was once a fringe theory has begun to attract more mainstream attention, with researchers now hunting for mechanisms capable of tuning brains toward criticality.
Charts galore
Drum has his Top 20 charts for 2023. I’ll pick one to copy here.
It’s all in your genes: This shouldn't really be big news to anyone, but as more and more studies are completed it becomes clearer that a very large share of most cognitive traits is in our genes. For overall intelligence it's about 70%. Sleep disorders are 65% genetic. Memory is 45% inherited.
I think both the left and right need to come to grips with this. A certain percentage of society isn’t going to have the ability to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Additionally, more education won't be beneficial to that same group. The point here is that some percentage of society (10–15%, maybe?) is low enough on the cognition scale that they are going to have a hard time finding and holding down a job that will be enough to survive on. With this reality, the question is: what do we do as a society? Do we choose to care for them, support them, and help them, or do we leave them on the streets?
One other comment on his The cost of college hasn't gone up much chart. The chart leaves out room and board. Room and board at a private college runs around $15k+ per year, and that is for around 30 weeks of housing and food. It is a major cost of college and not part of the tuition.
Sanity on the climate change narrative
This, What If People Don’t Need to Care About Climate Change to Fix It? (12/28/2023) is a great interview with Dr. Hannah Ritchie, editor of Our World in Data (which is great) and author of the upcoming book, “Not the End of the World.” Here are a couple of quotes, though the interview is worth reading in its entirety.
There’s an activist group in Germany called Last Generation. I’m not saying that everyone is telling their kids that they’re going to die from climate change, but there are strong activist groups where that is a core message. You can communicate that a problem is urgent without saying that we’re all going to die from it. How is a 12- or 14-year-old supposed to understand that? The reality is bad enough; we don’t need to overblow it. This rhetoric does work for some demographics and does inspire them into action. But there’s a large demographic where it has the opposite effect. They do not like this overblown message. They don’t trust these messages. It does a detriment to people trusting the scientist when these messages get the headlines. There are people on the far end of the spectrum, close to deniers — they love these headlines. They can weaponize this and say, “Look how ridiculous these people are.”
To some extent organic food. If the world was to go fully organic, it would have quite negative consequences. Organic farming tends to get lower yields, so we need more land for farming. That comes at the cost of forests and habitats. Another one is this notion that the best thing I can possibly eat is local. That’s not what the data shows. For most food, the transport component is a very small part of emissions, and shipping avocados from South America still has a lower carbon footprint than your local beef or lamb.
The spinning CD
Atelo Songs: Not in the mood
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Thank you
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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.
Have the authors of the TRUE/FALSE News discernment study factored-in the concept of “MY” truth, as practiced at certain elite universities?