40% of 18-24 year-olds are now enrolled in college, which is higher than ever, although the increase is 100% due to a rise in community college enrollment. And 85% of those same kids are finishing high school, the highest rate ever. And more men are enrolled in college than ever, and more whites are enrolled in college than ever. Blacks and Latinos are both slightly below their all-time enrollment highs, but Latinos are finishing high school in record numbers.

Damned if I can think of a good angle on this.

[Read the full Pew Center Study, for class.]

Statistically, when playing Russian Roulette you can place the six-shooter to your temple and pull the trigger twice before there's an actual mathematical likelihood of blowing your brains out. Likewise, with a mere one-sixth of our citizens officially living below the poverty line, two babies can be born in America before one of them has a good chance of being born into soul-crushing, life-destroying pennilessness.

Envy that, Bangladesh!

We're not the types who always parade around in stilts wearing an Uncle Sam costume with American flag briefs and reading the Bill of Rights into a megaphone at the top of our lungs in supermarket parking lots, but we must point out that we have some things to be proud of, here. Not only are we 84% penury-free; the majority of us even have jobs! Most of our wealthiest financiers are financially generous with at least one political party. Our stock market is still several points into five-digit territory. And we have far more honest priests than thieving priests—just like New York businesspersons not involved in the operation of a Ponzi scheme greatly outnumber those who are currently operating a Ponzi scheme.

So take comfort in the warm, soothing embrace of statistical probability, America. You're going to get through this recession alive. More likely than not.
[Pic via]

Bernanke said yesterday that he expects growth to return to the economy this year, which Time's Justin Fox points out isn't really news, since he said virtually the same thing last month. But the news narratives must be forged, so for some reason this time we're taking it seriously. Buffett told CNBC this morning that we've "hit a plateau at bottom," and Murdoch says he thinks the economy is "going to get a nice bump."

But all three men issued warnings that the the recovery will be slow, painful, and jobless. Here's Benanke:

Even though from a technical perspective the recession is very likely over at this point, it's still going to feel like a very weak economy for some time as many people will still find that their job security and their employment status is not what they wish it was.

In other words, the arbitrary statistical measures that we've decided to use to judge the health of the economy tell us that the recession is over, but most of the real-world measures that actual people use to judge the health of their economic lives—whether they have a job, can count on keeping the job, and make enough money from the job to live on—are still tanking. It's kind of like a pilot emerging from wreckage of an air disaster and announcing, "The plane crash is over!"

Terms like "recession" are obviously useful to economists and bankers, but they fail to capture the reason they are actually bad. So maybe we should come up with a new word to reign in the sort of statistical chicanery that permits headlines saying RECESSION IS OVER when unemployment continues to stand a hair under 10 percent and likely will for months and months to come. "Mancession" is already taken, sadly. How about "realcession"?

The new jobs report shows a faster-than-expected slowdown in the pace of job losses—247,000 were shed in July, when economists had expected 325,000—and an increase in hourly wages. So there is definitely good news to be had. But the New York Times' David Leonhardt points out that the topline number that is getting the most attention—the first decrease in unemployment since last April—is a statistical chimera hiding an actual increase in the total number of people without jobs:

The one thing that doesn't deserve much excitement is what will probably garner many of the headlines: the drop in the unemployment rate. It happened only because more people stopped looking for work and were thus ineligible to be counted as officially unemployed. The share of adults with jobs actually fell: to 59.4 percent, from 59.5 percent.

Those people who are conveniently "ineligible to be counted as officially unemployed" are also officially ineligible for unemployment benefits, which are beginning to run out across the nation as time runs out on the extensions included in the stimulus package. So we've managed to goose the employment numbers by cutting off benefits to people who don't have jobs and then denying that they exist. It's kind of like saying the cancer rate is dropping because once people die of cancer, they no longer count as having cancer.

Nerds who love numbers so much they should marry them used to go into "quant" hedge funds and make like millions of dollars, but that business has fallen off, thanks to the work of algorithms devised by those same geniuses. The new way to make $125K right out of grad school: be a statistician. Moneymaking jobs are getting even more boring than "corporate lawyer," if you can imagine.

"I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians," said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. "And I'm not kidding."

Look, if the Poindexters have all the smarts and all the money, they cannot have all the sexy. It is just not fair. Leave the sexy for Arthur Kade. Do we need a supersexy master race of calculator-toting statisticians figuring out new ways to scam us online by telling us to wire money to some fictional character who will then give us a job, because we are unemployed? No thank you, we would prefer to be scammed by unsexy people.

We are also being scammed by inanimate Metrocard vending machines.

Do not lose hope, unsophisticated jobless suckers! We have a hot stock tip, just for you: a tattoo removal firm is holding an IPO. Get in now. This will be awsome.

Ass-covering fineprint from the study (PDF):

All data presented here are from the wildlife-watching section of the 2006 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation (FHWAR). It is the most comprehensive survey of wildlife recreation in the United States. Overall, 11,300 detailed wildlife-watching interviews were completed with a response rate of 78 percent. The Survey focused on 2006 participation and expenditures by U.S. residents 16 years of age and older.

In 2006, there were 48 million birdwatchers or birders, 16 years of age and older, in the United States-about 21 percent of the population. What is a birder? The National Survey uses a conservative definition. To be counted as a birder, an individual must have either taken a trip one mile or more from home for the primary purpose of observing birds and/or closely observed or tried to identify birds around the home. Thus, people who happened to notice birds while they were mowing the lawn or picnicking at the beach were not counted as birders. Trips to zoos and observing captive birds also did not count.

Backyard birding or watching birds around the home is the most common form of bird-watching. Eighty-eight percent (42 million) of birders are backyard birders. The more active form of birding, taking trips away from home, is less common with 42 percent (20 million) of birders partaking.

Kalev Leetaru, the coordinator of information technology and research at the University of Illinois' Cline Center for Democracy, went back through seven years' worth data from the Drudge Report Archives—which has been taking a digital snapshot of the Drudge Report each time it's been updated since 2002—and mined it for clues as to how the elusive Junior Vasquez fan controls our media diet.

One of the many interesting datapoints unearthed by Leetaru's analysis is a curious drop in the total number of updates to the Drudge Report in 2008—an election year that should have seen a huge increase in the amount of stories, and therefore updates, that Drudge was covering. As a possible explanation for the drop-off Leetaru cites our reporting in March about the departure of Drudge understudy Andrew Breitbart from his operation. Breitbart left the site in mid-2008, and Drudge evidently had trouble keeping up the pace.

Leetaru saw another counterintuitive drop-off in updates during the Iraq War in 2003, which he explains by citing the overwhelming coverage that Iraq got in the news outlets Drudge relies on for stories. As newspapers focused their resources on Iraq and stopped writing about animal attacks, weather, and robot sex, Drudge had less to work with:

As major global events displace the news coverage that an aggregator relies on, that aggregator is forced to reduce its update cycle to accommodate the reduction in stories to link to.

As expected, Breitbart.com has been the chief beneficiary of Drudge links, netting 14,923 (or 14.5% of all links) since 2002, largely because Breitbart himself was doing the linking. Nice gig! The top newspaper beneficiary was the Washington Post with 6,471, nearly twice as many as the New York Times. And even though it was in existence for only two of the six years that Leetaru studied, Politico ranked 16th in terms of total Drudge links, catching nearly 50 in January of 2008 alone.

Leetaru also did a word analysis of Drudge's headlines—an undertaking that, given Drudge's facility as a headline writer, could serve as a guidebook for newspaper editors looking to save the industry—but decided not to filter out filler words and articles, so we only get the astonishing news that "to" is the most commonly used word in a Drudge headline. But the weird thing is the "Bush" outranked "a." Leetaru only charted out the Top Ten words; we've asked him for the full rankings and will let you know if he gives them to us.

[Via Politico.]

From the Times:

[A]n analysis by The New York Times of rainfall and homicides for the last six years shows that when it rains substantially in the summertime, there are fewer homicides.

When there was no precipitation, there was an average 17 homicides every 10 days. But when there was an inch or more of rain, the average dropped to 14.

The pattern is more pronounced if you only look at Saturdays in the summer—normally a high-volume day for homicides. Rainy summer Saturdays yielded an average 25 percent fewer murders than dry ones.

It's sort of an obvious point: Rainy days mean fewer people out on the streets, and fewer chances for encounters that could turn violent. The weather obviously doesn't affect rates of domestic homicide, and law enforcement sources told the Times that drug deals and similar potentially violent interactions continue unabated through downpours. But rain is enough of a factor in—at least temporarily—reducing the homicide rate that NYPD detectives like to say "the best cop in the world is on duty tonight" during rainstorms.

Researchers told the paper that rain doesn't have the same effect nationwide as it does in New York City, perhaps because people here don't have yards to hang out in and are more likely to be out, about, and murdering on sunny days. The downside of the phenomenon is that the murders that are committed on rainy days tend to be harder to solve—evidence gets washed away, and potential witnesses run off to dry places.

So take heart, New Yorkers. The miserable weather you've been suffering through since May has saved lives. Will it be worth the price when—if—the sun ever returns? Yes!

No word yet on how crazy orange clouds affect street violence.

[Photo by Andrew O'Brien via Flickr.]

Selena Roberts just wrote the big scandalous book about A-Rod (and the NYT was scooped on its contents, btw). One of her accusations in the book: that, during blowout games, A-Rod used to tip batters on the opposing team to what pitches were on the way, if they would do the same for him.

So last Sunday, the NYT examined A-Rod's stats in a "Keeping Score" column, and found that there was no statistical evidence to back up the allegation (better hitting by A-Rod or the opposing middle infielders late in blowout games, for example). The headline: "Numbers Indicate Rodriguez Didn't Tip Pitches With Rangers."

Which pissed off Selena Roberts, we hear! Her reps contacted the NYT, complaining that the story's writer never contacted her, and, more importantly, that the story's headline wasn't supported by its facts because her book claims that A-Rod was cheating with a select group of buddies, not every opposing middle infielder in baseball.

We hear that the Times acknowledged that the headline was erroneous, but internal debate about whether to run an editor's note—a debate which went all the way up to Bill Keller—took so long that the correction to the story was just added yesterday.

Here it is:

A headline for the Keeping Score column on Sunday, about an analysis of the assertion in a new book that Alex Rodriguez revealed pitches to opposing middle infielders to let them know what was coming with the expectation that they would return the favor, referred incorrectly to the findings. As the column reported, the numbers show that either no so-called tipping of pitches occurred or that it was ineffective; the numbers did not "indicate" that "Rodriguez didn't tip pitches."

But Roberts is still pissed that nothing in the story was changed. Says one of the people who are working with her: "First The Times was beaten by its former reporter with the bombshell story that A-Rod used steroids. Then The Times gets the story about A-Rod cheating during games all wrong. But Bill Keller is too worried about losing readers and losing money to risk losing faith among readers by running an appropriate editor's note or full correction."

That seems a bit overblown. (We've contacted the paper for comment and we'll let you know what we hear. UPDATE: See their response below.) The original headline may have been a stretch, but stats are stats. A-Rod could have gotten tipped off for pitches and still not hit better. He could have done it so infrequently that it didn't show up in his stats. You can both be right! Let's all come together to condemn this rich baseball player as one.

[NYT story with correction here. Selena Roberts also addresses this in a Deadspin podcast today.]

UPDATE: NYT spokesperson Diane McNulty sends us this response:

The article did not take issue with Selena Roberts's assertions about A-Rod. It said that the effects that any tipped pitches would normally be expected to produce did not show up in statistics, which indicated that "either no tipping was going on or it was pathetically ineffective." The headline on the article went beyond that and so we promptly (on Monday for Tuesday's paper, typical for errors in Sunday editions) corrected it. There was no internal debate at all about whether to run an editors' note.

So we've examined all the data that came back to us tonight and here's the average Gawker reader in a nutshell—-A young, well-educated, tech savvy, ADD-stricken, whiskey drinking, chronically masturbating atheist with bi-sexual tendencies.

Surprised? We think not!

And oh yeah, you're also more likely to suffer from epilepsy, schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder than the average web user, just in case you were wondering about that.





Yaay us!

The Post reports: It's time to get your fucking guns out, downtown party people:

Downtown Manhattan, the city's party mecca, has been hit by an alarming spike in vicious street violence.

Assaults in Greenwich Village lead the frightening upturn, with a whopping 43 percent increase so far this year compared with the same period in 2008.

Crime's also up in Tribeca and the East Village and the LES! Is it the angry poors finally seeping out of their own neighborhood and doing some reverse gentrification? Probably not! Police blame it on drunk party people—not a classic sign of a painful recession!

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Take a look at the Post's scary crime chart , at left. The first thing you should note is that the figure for the East Village should be 27.7%, not 42.9%. [You can look these things up, too!].

Now, consider the very, very worst neighborhood on here: the shadowy streets of Greenwich Village. Yes, year-to-date felony assaults are up by almost 43%. What does that mean? It means there have been 40 assaults so far this year, 12 more than this time last year. That means that, on average, there have been about two more assaults every three weeks, in the entire precinct. Not exactly South Bronx 1985 numbers. Oh and look, in that same precinct, robbery, burglary, and grand larcenies are all down by double digits, and the murder count for the year is 0. Facts which did not find their way into the Post's public service piece about the "VIOLENT CRIME WAVE."

Although I did once see a dude get knocked the fuck out in broad daylight on 14th and 6th!

In conclusion you are still much safer walking around Greenwich Village than, say, trying to steal Col Allan's drink.
[NYP. Also Alex Balk has a theory on this stuff. Pic of typical downtown NYC crime via Flickr.]

1. Stay off of television: You got yourself a (well-deserved) spot as a TV election pundit during the election cycle, Nate. But your future is behind a computer. You're not particularly telegenic (don't feel bad, neither are we!), and besides, the punditocracy is already overflowing. We don't need another talking head; we need a true guru. Plus, TV appearances require you to learn to apply makeup, which the Times has already packaged as an anecdote to poke fun at you. Don't fall into this trap.

2. Follow the money: Statistics show (never gets old) that corporate America has all the money. Baseball fans and political junkies are fine people, but they're not the ones holding an extravagant portion of the world's wealth in their dessicated, greedy hands. In order to have a long-term career you're going to have to do something that appeals to the corporate types. Luckily, they love numbers too!

3. Open a consultancy: "Consultant" is the best job of all. You get to sell your advice for steep prices—then, if your advice turns out to be awful, it doesn't matter because you already got paid. Your future is in selling your statistical magic to evil corporate overlords. And you're already ahead of the game, because you have a catchy name. "Silver Consultants" or something like that should look good on a business card.

4. Don't be evil: Just because we stole this slogan from The Google doesn't mean it's bad advice. Just as there are plenty of TV pundits, there are also plenty of consultants willing to pimp out their expertise to the highest bidder, regardless of how many sweatshops they run. Your advantage, Nate, is that you're actually better than your competition right now, which gives you some leverage over your clients. That means you can pre-screen to ensure that Silver Consultants does not provide its trademarked Mystical Statisticals to any firm that wants to do terrible awful things with the knowledge! In this way you become both rich and ethical, at least by the standards of the rich.

5. In four years, sign on with Obama: Might as well make it official. This election was your audition. We all know it. Everyone knows you're good. You have three years to get your consultancy up and running, make a pile of money, and then become the chief pollster for Obama '12. This is truly Living The Dream. Nate Silver, you are the new Mark Penn. Only younger, smarter, and less evil. We hope.

[Pic via Newsweek]

Think about it: A lone nut was able to effectively seal off the entire New York Times building—and get an entire floor evacuated—by filling up an envelope with some fish tank pebbles or something. The same thing happened to the Times a month after 9/11, and they evacuated the entire newsroom. Also, "since then, there have been several other cases of suspicious materials being sent to The Times. None turned out to be harmful."

It doesn't take much extrapolation to figure out that you could cost the NYT millions of dollars over the course of a year with just a box of safety envelopes and two scoops of baking soda. (And the Times can't afford it!) And really, is anthrax still a thing? It takes an incredibly sophisticated scientist to produce weapons-grade anthrax, and we haven't had any real anthrax attacks since that one rash we had several years back. It's basically the skyscraper equivalent of being made to remove your shoes when you go on planes. One single dude ruined it for everyone.

So our suggestion: If you receive some powder in the mail, calmly call the cops. Don't shut down the building. Don't evacuate everyone. A decent actuary will tell you that, hey, in the long run your odds are extremely good. And that's what the New York Times stands for: facts, statistics, and a life chained to a desk. Back to work!

[We reserve the right to change our minds when we receive anthrax here.]

Nate Silver started writing about how wrong polls were in a little Daily Kos diary, and lo and behold, he ended up predicting the primaries better than anyone! Then all the pros were like, who is this kid? When he revealed himself as a Baseball Prospectus writer, a very thin slice of stat geeks were all like, "ZOMG unbelievably awesome!"

Imagine if you found out that Richard Lawson had been selected as the new announcer on Monday Night Football. That's the level of thing that I'm talking about here, people.

So of course New York did a big story on this kid, what with his acceptable level of quirk. He's basically the smartest pollster in America now, amazingly. And we'll cut through all the technical mumbo-jumbo and give it to you straight:

As of October 8, the day after the town-hall debate, Silver’s simulations had Obama winning the election 90 percent of the time.

Brevity! [NY Mag; pic via Chicago Reader. To better understand this issue, read everything at Fire Joe Morgan immediately.]

Oh no! The financial sector exploded! The market is, uh, failing! "What do we do" is the response of, like, economists. Politicians know the important question is "WHO DO WE BLAME." So liberals jumped on deregulating Conservatives and President Bush and evil Wall Street fatcats and so on. Conservatives, oddly, also blamed most of those people, except for a small but vocal subset who blamed this collapse of everything on... poor black people?

Several days ago, Neil Cavuto, host of Fox News' Your World, proclaimed, "Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster."

On WorldNetDaily, a compendium of loopy half-truths, pundit Drew Zahn declared that "when federal regulators demanded parity between racial groups in lending, the only way to achieve a quota would be to begin making intentionally bad lending decisions."

The conservative National Review Online trotted out a favorite whipping boy, the Community Reinvestment Act, claiming that the legislation was the result of "racially inflammatory campaigns" that forced banks to "make mortgages available to people without much in the way of income, assets or credit."

The CRA option has the bonus of pinning blame on black people and Bill Clinton!

But, hah, none of this is true, at all. The CRA just affected banks and thrifts, which are regulated. "The heart of the crisis was caused by unregulated and lightly regulated mortgage brokers and independent mortgage bankers and affiliates that are not subject to the CRA," says law professor Michael Barr. Tyler Cowen puts it thus: "Did policies such as the Community Reinvestment Act significantly worsen the housing bubble and the subsequent collapse? Basically not, although in my view these were bad policies for other reasons." There's your talking point, and he provides some supporting evidence.

Our favorite debunking comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates:

I know very little about economics, but I know quite a bit about people. 1.) Folks who use single cause logic to explain gigantic complicated phenomena are almost always lying, ignorant or children. 2.) Folks who peddle victimology for giants ("the banks were forced to do it") while decrying the victimology of individual humans ("the white man forced me to do it") are also usually just lying. The Blame The Negroes (BTN) theory satisfies both criteria.

He goes on from there on the "ugly history" of the sort of argument the CRA thing represents. As always, he's worth reading.

But, of course, through the fault primarily of greedy lenders, many of the worst subrime loans went to minorities. ("The Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit research group, examined 50,000 subprime loans nationwide and found that blacks and Hispanics were 30 percent more likely than whites to be charged higher interest rates, even among borrowers with similar credit ratings.") So the crisis hits homeowning minorities disproportionately (culture of ownership!). A good, serious, liberal 'bailout' bill would renegotiate the terms of those mortgages and keep those homeowners out of foreclosure. The Paulson bill didn't have that, but the Dodd-Frank-Paulson bill had some (arguably mostly cosmetic) provisions to protect homeowners.

Still, the bill was largely seen as more helpful to Wall Street than, in the memorable words of last week's Weekend Update, Martin Luther King Boulevard. Black members of Congress felt pressure to oppose the bill from Black talk show hosts and their constituencies, because the bill was seen as, you know, welfare for rich whites while they get nothing. And, hilariously, the white right-wing voters who called on their GOP Members to vote against the bill presumably now think the money was needed to bail out the blacks who got us in this mess. And the Jews who own the banks!

So the Congressional Black Caucus voted 18 pro, 21 against the bailout bill. Which is not quite decisive but it's still telling.

And did work on the Bailout bill really need to stop completely during the Jewish holy days? Even leaving aside the important work of Banking Committee chairman Barney Frank, Jewish congress members voted 20 in favor and 9 against, so presumably their absence would've made the final vote even more decisively against.

(Remember, of course: Black and Jewish congressmen are more likely to be Democrats, and thus more likely to support the bill to begin with. And keep in mind also regional differences!)

SO to sum up, a Democratic bill needs more Black support to win without Republicans, who we should probably just give up on because they think Black people are to blame for this.

…until they reach their mid-forties at least! So there is, it turns out, probably a surplus of single young dudes, and an absolute paucity of single old dudes. Oh yeah, and none of this counts unmarrieds in relationships, which decidedly includes The Gays:

Sure, there are some issues with the map. The first: homosexuality! This data and this map are completely heteronormative, but please direct invective at our pal the Census Bureau. Also, I don't think I can really trust the internet on this one, but men are about twice as likely to identify as gay than women - what's this mean for the map? It'll skew hard towards there being a ton of unmarried men!

Ha ha ha, guess that's Javascript for "blueballs," ladies! Next time.

"In the study, Obermeyer's group compared data on war deaths from eyewitnesses and the media from 13 countries over the past 50 years with peacetime data in the United Nations World Health Surveys, which was collected after the end of the wars. This method avoids problems collecting data during active combat, and also reduces counting deaths twice or exaggerating the number, Obermeyer said.

"The researchers estimate that 5.4 million people died from 1955 to 2002 as a result of wars in 13 countries. These deaths range from 7,000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo to 3.8 million in Vietnam.

"According to Obermeyer, the estimates are three times higher than those of previous reports. Data from this new study also suggests that 378,000 people worldwide died a violent death in war each year between 1985 and 1994, compared with 137,000 estimated at the time.

"The biggest differences were seen in Bangladesh, where 269,000 people died during that country's struggle for independence, compared with previous estimates of 58,000, the report shows. In Zimbabwe, the researchers estimate that 130,000 people have died in times of conflict, compared with earlier estimates of 28,000." [ABCnews via MetaFilter]