Pew Research Center Explains the Numbers Behind the 'Great' Recession

Yesterday, the Census Bureau made it official: The US's poverty rate hit 15.1 percent in 2010, as the median household income dropped and more than half of working Americans reported a job-related hardship. Today, the Pew Research Center tries to make sense of the numbers with a series of articles that highlight — and in some cases explains — the impact of what is increasingly being called the Great Recession.

Amid all the doom and gloom, the survey points to the positive: "More than six-in-ten survey respondents (62%) say they expect their personal financial situation to improve in the coming year—the most optimistic reading on this question since before the recession began. Likewise, about six-in-ten (61%) say they believe the damage the recession has inflicted on the U.S. economy will prove to be temporary rather than permanent."

The report looks at economic outcomes, attitudinal trends, and behavioral changes among the full population, including subgroups. The analysis comes from two sources: a Pew Research telephone survey of a national sample of 2,967 adults conducted from May 11 to May 31, 2010 and a Pew Research analysis of government economic and demographic trend data.

Here's one interesting info nugget from the survey: "Blacks and Hispanics are more upbeat than whites. The young are more optimistic than middle-aged and older Americans. And Democrats are more upbeat than Republicans, even though Democrats have lower incomes and less wealth and have suffered more recession-related job losses. One likely explanation for these seemingly counterintuitive patterns is that in an age of highly polarized politics, Democrats and Republicans differ not only in their values, attitudes and policy positions, but, increasingly, in their basic perceptions of reality."

A Round-up on How to Find Cheap Text Books

'The Bucks Guide to Finding Cheap Textbooks: 3rd Edition,' by New York Times reporter Tara Siegel Bernard. A few nice info nuggets from the article:

Textbook "prices increased 22 percent over the last four years, according to the Student PIRGs, or more than four times the rate of inflation. On average, students at four-year public colleges were estimated to spend $1,137 on books and supplies during the 2010-2011 academic year, according to the College Board."

Makes me wonder what's the latest with the Kno Table and if anyone is using it or buying "their" books for the iPad.

Students 'Lousy Searchers' for Info (Surprise?)

But, really, can we blame Google? The Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL) Project, a two-year study of the student research process involving five US universities, found that — surprise! — students have crude research skills and are typically unwilling to ask university librarians for help. The study, to be published by the American Library Association and titled "Libraries and Student Culture: What We Now Know," included interviews with students, librarians, and academics in hopes of better understanding the research habits of college kids.

Google has been called out for essentially allowing students to remain clueless about their poor searching abilities, but Steve Kolowich, a reporter for Inside Higher Ed, cuts straight to the chase. The key finding from the ERIAL studies was perhaps "the most predictable": When "it comes to finding and evaluating sources in the Internet age, students are downright lousy." But again, is anyone surprised?

Only seven out of 30 students observed at Illinois Wesleyan “conducted what a librarian might consider a reasonably well-executed search,” wrote Lynda Duke, an academic outreach librarian at Illinois Wesleyan and Andrew Asher, an anthropologist at Bucknell University who leaded the research effort. “While the interface of Google and other similar search engines might be more intuitive," explained Asher, "what’s going on behind the scenes isn’t intuitive at all, and very few students had a clear conception of how search engines work. This lack of understanding compounds the problem of building an effective search strategy." Fortunately, that can be taught, both inside and outside of a library. Also, I am hoping that the final report includes a historical perspective. Do we really think that college kids from 20 years ago were better at searching databases? At least now, most students have even easier access to a librarian thanks to online chat.

The Cost of Eating Healthy: $2.38

Mother Jones has a nice wrap-up on the cost of eating healthy: Yes, there's a price, but one that's not too bad, assuming you and your family plans ahead. The article, along with a slew of others, stem from this week's federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010, a report from Health Affairs that emphasized the need for Americans to consume more potassium, dietary fiber, vitamin D, and calcium, and to get fewer calories from saturated fat and added sugar.

Two writers at Grist report that they were able to eat healthily for $2.38 per person, per meal (cooked at home) while eating "plenty of organic produce ... local eggs, buffalo meat and un-homogenized milk in glass bottles."

Word Play: Google's Ngram Viewer

For those who enjoy tracking name trends on the Baby Name Wizard, there's a similar offering for books from Google’s Ngram Viewer (via VSL).

Google has digitized millions of books, and Ngram Viewer lets you follow the evolution and occasional extinction of words. "Hella"? Its usage spiked around 1810 to 1820, when people wrote about it in reference to a town along the Tigris with big religious significance. Or that "hobo" — most popular in the 1930s — is back on the rise (same goes for "tuberculosis," which was off the charts in usage at the turn of the century)? And that references to "Internet" actually show up prior to 1950? (Oops, explains the Google crew, wisely ruling out time-traveling software engineers. That "usage" is credited to faulty optical character recognition (OCR) errors that couldn't be filtered out.) Oh, and for the kids in the back of the class: Yes, you can search dirty words. Not surprisingly, their usage spiked in the 1960s.

Of course, Ngram Viewer could prove useful for genuine research (when did "Latino" gain popularity, or usage of "Negro" trend toward "African American"?). The Google Labs crew highlights another interesting word trend: usage of "nursery school," "kindergarten," and "child care" from 1950 to 2000:

What the y-axis shows is this: of all the bigrams contained in our sample of books written in English and published in the United States, what percentage of them are "nursery school" or "child care"? Of all the unigrams, what percentage of them are "kindergarten"? Here, you can see that use of the phrase "child care" started to rise in the late 1960s, overtaking "nursery school" around 1970 and then "kindergarten" around 1973. It peaked shortly after 1990 and has been falling steadily since.

And for people wanting to use data from the Ngram Viewer for scholarly research, the staff at Harvard University's Cultural Observatory offers some tips.

Sources: VSL, Google (Jean-Baptiste Michel*, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman Aiden*. Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books. Science [Published online ahead of print: 12/16/2010])

What Color Is Your Culture?

Visual.ly info graphic maps cultures and colors (click to enlarge the graphic). Reminds me that in April, Forbes' Ed Zitron wrote about Visual.ly rolling out an easy-to-use tool for creating well-designed infographics this summer.

Source: Visual.ly

Youth Counts

Nearly half of the world's population is under 25.

Source: World Population Foundation (WPF), Google's Think Quarterly

(Google just launched an online publication. The inaugural issue tackles innovation, from eight pillars of creativity to tomorrow's top thinkers. Yep, there's plenty of Google mentions, but it's not the lovefest one might imagine. In fact, not all writers or interviewees are enamored with the search et al giant.

India's Future in Numbers

"India has world-class information-technology exporters but imports lots of fridges; it has 15 times more phone subscribers than taxpayers; and in the coming years most Indians are likelier to be connected to a national, biometric, electronic identity-system than to a sewer."

Source: The Economist's article, "The half-finished revolution: India’s liberalisation began with a bang in 1991, but two decades on the unreformed parts of the economy are becoming a drag on growth. Time for another bang"

Did You Know? Statistics 'AG' (aka 'After Google')

What Matters Most?

Grown-ups love figures. When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you, "What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies? Instead, they demand: "How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?" Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.

—The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Richard Howard

America Sleep Deprived

Today, NPR reports that the typical high school senior gets less than 7 hours of sleep each school night, instead of the recommended 9.25 hours. That means most students face a 10-hour "sleep deficit" by the weekend.

Worst still: Sleeping in on Saturday and Sunday only makes matters worse, as it encourages kids' natural nocturnal ways when they're faced with 7:30 or 8 a.m. morning start times for schools. (Previously, NPR reported that letting teens sleep in could help them avoid morning car accidents.)

Of course, their parents are necessarily better off: A 12-state phone survey of roughly 75,000 people found that more than 33 percent of them had slept less than 7 hours the night, and 38 percent said they had fallen asleep without meaning to during at least one day in the previous month.

Sources: NPR, CDC

Considering the Gap Between Rich and Poor

Take a look at the graph to the right: As the countries on the left show, the incomes of rich households rose at faster rate than the incomes of poor households.

As the Economist puts it:

American society is more unequal than those in most other OECD countries, and growth in inequality there has been relatively large. But with very few exceptions, the rich have done better over the past 30 years, even in highly egalitarian places like Scandinavia.

Why? The report points to three possible answers: lower trade barriers combined with technology advancements, rich people marrying other rich people, and fluid job markets.

The chart shows the countries that comprise the EU as discrete enties. To compare the United States with the EU, consider the CIA World Factbook, which estimates its 2009 Gini index at 30.4.

The Cost of Living

NPR talked with Shawn McMahon, who calculates individual and family budgets as the research director for the Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW), a group that works with low-income women and families.

According to the nonprofit group's Basic Economic Security Tables index, American families need to earn at least $68,000 a year to achieve basic economic security. As NPR points out, that's more than three times higher than the national poverty level. Plus, child care and transportation often top housing as the biggest household expense.

Here are some other tidbits pulled from the report:

"The large majority of US employers still offer health insurance to their full-time workers. However, a large minority of all US workers, 46%, don't or can't partici- pate in employer insurance plans. The average 2-adult, 2-child family which cannot or does not participate

in an employer-sponsored health insurance plan pays $224 more per month—$2,687 per year—more than those who do participate in employer health plans."

"The eight largest occupations among women are all traditional 'women's jobs.' Most pay low wages, and only 1 requires a bachelor's degree." (Click on image below to enlarge.)

Cancer Deaths Dropping Since 1990s, But Childhood Cancer Incidence Up Slightly

Cancer deaths have been dropping steadily since the early 1990s among both men and women. Childhood cancer incidence rates continued to increase slightly. Death rates in this age group (birth to age 19) continue to decrease.

Yes, this data looks outdated with the 2007 date; however, the CDC only recently released it in association with a forthcoming report:

Kohler BA, Ward E, McCarthy BJ, Schymura MJ, Ries LAG, Eheman C, Jemal A, Anderson RA, Ajani UA, Edwards BK. Annual report to the nation on the status of cancer, 1975–2007, featuring tumors of the brain and other nervous system. Journal of the National Cancer Institute May 4, 2011.

Source: Centers for Disease Control