Grades and Booze and Graphs -- Gee Whiz

October 21, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Drinking lowers your GPA. So do smoking, spending time on the computer, and probably other forms of moral dissolution. That’s the conclusion of a survey of 10,000 students in Minnesota.

Inside Higher Ed reported it, as did the Minnesota press with titles like “Bad Habits = Bad Grades.” Chris Uggen reprints graphs of some of the “more dramatic results” (that’s the report’s phrase, not Chris’s). Here’s a graph of the effects of the demon rum.


Pretty impressive . . . if you don’t look too closely. But note: the range of the y-axis is from 3.0 to 3.5.

I’ve blogged before about “gee whiz” graphs , and I guess I’ll keep doing so as long as people keep using them. Here are the same numbers, but the graph below scales them on the traditional GPA scale of 0 to 4.0.


The difference is real – the teetotalers have a B+ average, heaviest drinkers a B. But is it dramatic?

I also would like finer distinctions in the independent variable, but maybe that’s because my glass of wine with dinner each night, six or seven a week, puts me in the top category with the big boozers. I suspect that the big differences are not between the one-drink-a-day students and the teetotalers but between the really heavy drinkers – the ones who have six drinks or more in a sitting, not in a week– and everyone else.

If I Were a Rich Man

October 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m probably too late here – the timer on Joe the Plumber’s fifteen minutes of fame may have already run out. Still, he was right to be worried about taxes. It turns out that he owes $1182 in back taxes.

But that’s not the concern John McCain used to turn his name into shorthand for the overtaxed worker. No, what Joe and John were worried about was that 3% increase once his income hits $250,000. To reach that level, Joe’s income would have to triple or maybe quadruple. Still, it’s never too soon to start complaining about taxes on the wealthy, and Joe wants to make sure that when he does reach the quarter-million mark, those tax rates won’t have increased.

Joe isn’t alone in his optimism. Over forty percent of men in Joe’s age range think that it’s likely they’ll become “rich.”

The 2003 Gallup poll found that optimism declined with age. And definitions of rich varied with income. Only those with incomes of $50,000 or more thought that to be rich you needed an income of at least $200,000. For middle-income people ($30-50K), $100,000 was rich.

McCain also took Obama to task for suggesting that it might be better to “spread the wealth around.” The right wing is screaming “socialist.” But more recent Gallup polls show that Americans aren’t all that opposed to redistribution.

Click on the graphs to see them large enough that you can read the titles.

If you believe the poll, you also shouldn’t be too worried that Obama’s tax proposal will cost him a lot of votes.

Dig These New Threads

October 15, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

I passed by a fancy men’s store on Columbus Avenue the other day, and to my admittedly non-fashion-trained eye, the new suits looked very much like the ones I’ve been seeing each week on Mad Men.

Mad Men, for those still unfamiliar with this Emmy winner, is set in a New York advertising agency in the early 1960s. Culturally, that’s the tail end of the 1950s.* What the show teaches us about this period is this: Everyone smoked – a lot. Everyone drank – a lot. And an ad agency was a place people went in those odd moments when they were not actively committing adultery.

Here’s the show’s central figure Don Draper. And on the right, a 2008 Hugo available at Bloomingdale’s.

To me, the suits look very similar – two buttons, narrow lapels, unpleated trousers. And although this Boss man leaves his collar open, if you look at the other suits where I found this , you’ll see a few neckties that look a lot like the one Draper is wearing, though perhaps a shade wider.

The similarity isn’t surprising. Clothing makers have to keep changing the styles to get us to feel embarrassed to wear the same suit we’ve been wearing for the last few years and buy a new one. But there are only so many variations on a man’s suit, so old styles have to get recycled.

Language, too, has its fashions, dude, even though nobody makes money from the currency of words and phrases. But language is nearly infinite, so there’s no need to recycle. Then why is Ta-Nehisi Coates writing this:

I don’t ever want to hear anyone complaining about black people and their conspiracy theories. The cat on the corner – or even the Reverend – yelling about the government inventing AIDS is off his rocker. . .

Or this:

There is nothing troubling about one lone racist nut in a crowd. What’s troubling is the crowd. Dig how they just look on and smile uncomfortably.

Cat? Dig?

Coates is black, hip, and thirty-three years old (the age of Don Draper in 1960, when Mad Men begins). Maybe fifties hipster lingo, like those suits, is going to come back in style. Meanwhile, I’ll be listening to my LP of “Kind of Blue,” man, ’cause I like really dig Miles. That Madison Avenue scene is just too square..


* The “decade” we call “The Sixties” doesn’t begin until late 1963, with LBJ, Vietnam, and the Beatles.

AV Educational Tools - Oh, the Cost

October 14, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

[Sen. Obama] voted for nearly a billion dollars in pork barrel earmark projects, including, by the way, $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?

I knew there had to be something wrong with this when McCain said it in the debate. I was pretty sure that the planetarium wasn’t buying the overhead projector I used to use for showing my transparencies.* I was right. The overhead projector the planetarium wants looks like a character out of Star Wars.


And by the way, the project was never funded. (Full story here.)

McCain’s complaint would be like mocking NASA for wanting $3 million dollar for a radio. “My friends, I can get one from Radio Shack for $8.95, and it picks up Rush Limbaugh perfectly.” No matter that NASA wants one that will beam signals back from Mars.

*We don’t have those any more, of course. Now, I have to schlepp my laptop to “smart room,” connect the VGA cable to the video port, reset the CRT/LCD display option, select the User Laptop function from the projector menu, and wait for the projector to warm up.