Archive: Mar 2009

Yes, it’s another table from Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight. He’s had some great stuff up lately. Here we have changes in compensation (per employee) between 1992 and 2007 for various industries, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data:

I do question some of these classifications–for instance, is “performing arts, spectator sports, museums, and related activities” really a coherent category? Nonetheless, it provides a relatively consistent measurement of compensation, which is useful for comparing change over time.

I wandered over to the BLS website and ended up on their Occupational Injuries and Illnesses page. There I discovered this in the National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries in 2007:

Along with the graph, we learn,

Workplace homicides involving police officers and supervisors of retail sales workers both saw substantial increases in 2007.

Police officers makes sense. But retail supervisors? Huh. I wonder what the actual numbers are.

From the same report we get the number and rate of fatalities by industry:

The extraction industries (mining, forestry, farming, fishing, hunting) are noticeable outliers here, with significantly higher fatality rates (though not overall numbers) than any other industries.

So there’s some totally unconnected information about the labor force for you.

(Found here, via Thick Culture.)

Sloshspot via Flowing Data.

UPDATE: Just FYI, lots of people have identified inaccuracies in this map in the comments.

Kelly Zen-Tie Tsai asks Obama to include the even-less-visible minorities (by which she doesn’t mean the purple, blue, and green):

Via Stuff White People Do, where there is also a nice discussion.

Elisabeth R. sent us this one-minute commercial.  I’ll let you experience it as designed (it has a surprise ending) and include my comments below:

We might feel that feminism and gun ownership are incompatible.  An argument could be made that (especially machine) gun ownership is anti-feminist, but it’s also true that we artificially cluster rather random, unconnected ideas into political ideologies that we then understand to be compatible by definition.  For example, what does being anti-gay marriage and anti-taxes have to do with each other?  Nothing.

For more on pro-gun propaganda, see this extensive set of really fascinating posters making feminist, anti-racist, and pro-gay arguments in favor of gun ownership.

For another example of an effort to bridge the political binary, see this post on pro-environment/anti-immigrant activism

Franklin S. alerted us to the fact that someone at Complex magazine goofed.  Our reward is another peek into the re-touching process that shapes nearly every image in our lives.  This time the subject is Kim Kardashian.  Animal made the find:

We spotted this image (left)… this morning in their “web exclusive” gallery, but by afternoon she was looking recognizably altered (right) and then removed from the site completely.

See all of our re-touching posts here.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight put up this graph of U.S. household debt (from the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances):

Silver says,

Per-family household debt increased by about 130% in real dollars between 1989 and 2007, from roughly $42,000 per family in 1989 to $97,000 eighteen years later. Most of that increase has come during the past six or seven years — household debt increased by 52% between 2001 and 2007 alone. Almost all of the debt (about 85%) falls into the category that the Fed calls “secured by residential property” — which means mortgages and home-equity loans.

Some other images from the SCF Chartbook (available here)–and pay attention to the y axis, since the scale isn’t the same in all of them:

This next one is for rural (non-MSA) and urban (MSA) areas:

The Chartbook has images of the mean values for all these calculations as well, I just prefer the median to reduce the effects of outlier incomes.

I found the following Web site, PzG, as I was comparison shopping on the Web for a 1:6 action figure that I wanted for customization [to strip of the Nazi associations and use for other, fictional purposes!]. PzG bills itself as “Your Third Reich Nazi Adolf Hitler HQ!” According to its index page, it sells

Distinctive Panzer, Kriegsmarine, Luftwaffe, Waffen SS, and German WWII Nazi resources for hobbyists, teachers,museums and all students of Third Reich history in one convenient location.

As I clicked through the various pages of the site, I quickly realized that it was an Aryan supremacist/Nazi apologist storefront.  Interestingly enough, though, PzG knows that its views are objectionable to many and even addresses this on the page selling mousepads.

The mousepad page says:

No place to hang your favorite war art or recruitment poster? Wife or roomate [sic] dosn’t [sic] approve of your artwork selections? NOT A PROBLEM ANYMORE! Get your perfect piece of historical nazi artwork in an everyday usable format. Get all your favorite designs and change your mousepads often to keep your workspace an inspiring and motivational headquaters [sic].

Note how the page acknowledges that spouses and housemates probably won’t like pro-Nazi displays in their houses. Nevertheless, the page accentuates the “positive” attributes of Nazi culture and iconography [creating an “inspiring and motivational” work place], but never forgets its militaristic origins [mousepads are used in “headquaters”]. This site especially sparks discussions about the use of language to construct a societally acceptable image for a group that most people would find viscerally objectionable.

Incidentally, on the same site, you can also find the site owners’ discussion of the Mothers’ Cross [medals given to women under the Third Reich who birthed many children]. The historical discussion of these medals shifts almost seamlessly into a glorification of the site owner’s large, expanding family, with photos of wife and children as they grow. Is this family practicing the principles elaborated in our earlier discussion about the Mothers’ Cross medal?