Timely Snow

So according to this article, discussed here, about 15% of children in the U.S. live in houses without a landline telephone, almost all because the family only has cellphones.

Here’s the graph:

wireless200805_119157.png (PNG Image, 960×717 pixels)

Hanging Up in Chinese | Sinosplice: Life in China.

A very nice article by John Pasden on how people get off the phone in Chinese. 就这样

I wonder how widespread this view is, although the coincidence of the Tangshan earthquake and the deaths of Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong is certainly something people in China are aware of (I’m not sure who the other figure was to whom Pomfret alludes).

By the way, my daughter is teaching in Beijing this year. [...]

I’m pretty skeptical about the magnitude of the differences, but this is an interesting idea (plotting distribution of the Big 5 personality traits by geographical location):

Interestingly, America’s psychogeography lines up reasonably well with its economic geography. Greater Chicago is a center for extroverts and also a leading center for sales professionals. The Midwest, long a [...]

This is an amazing graph. If you mouse over it, you can see what the unlabeled categories are, as well as what percent of spending it made up, and how that changed over the last year. From looking at it quickly, it seems clear that

1. We’re complete outliers,

2. As a group, Americans have ample room [...]

This is an elegant demonstration showing a simple, systematic bias in sampling. I’m not sure when I’d have the opportunity to use it, but perhaps sometime it will be apt.

When my wife and I lived in Beijing for half a year in 2003, she pointed out how much she enjoyed listening to the news on China Radio International. Unlike in the U.S., the news was relentlessly upbeat—progress was being made, and where there were problems, they were being addressed.

James Fallows today notes a [...]