30 December 2018

Sunday Sundries

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Married Men Outearn Single Men (and Women as a Whole)
Analysis of US data show that when marital status is factored in, single men tend to earn roughly what single women and married women do, while married men far outearn the other three groups.

Estimates of the Heritability of Human Longevity Are Substantially Inflated due to Assortative Mating
Look at what can be done with pedigree data from Ancestry public trees. Includes some interesting stats on Ancestry public trees.
Although “nominal heritability” estimates based on correlations among genetic relatives agreed with prior literature, the majority of that correlation was also captured by correlations among nongenetic (in-law) relatives, suggestive of highly assortative mating around life span-influencing factors (genetic and/or environmental). Assortative mating is individuals with similar phenotypes mating with one another more frequently than would be expected under a random mating pattern.  The true heritability of human longevity for birth cohorts across the 1800s and early 1900s was well below 10%, and that it has been generally overestimated due to the effect of assortative mating.

Everyday terrorism: A woman or girl is killed every other day in Canada

For perspective from StatsCan "In 2017, the majority of both homicide victims (74% or 485 victims) and those accused (87% or 459 accused) were male. These proportions have remained relatively stable over the past 13 years for victims of homicide and since the beginning of collection (1961) for accused of homicide."

Charles Dickens on Seeing the Poor
Via Tim Taylor, the Conversable Economist, a piece by Dickens written for the weekly journal Household Words that he edited from 1850 to 1859. It's from the issue of January 26, 1856, with his first-person reporting on "A Nightly Scene in London."

1 comment:

Persephone said...

Well, if we're going for perspective, John, I think we need to ask who's doing the killing.

Based on data from StatsCan, The Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability says: Although homicide rates are generally higher for males than females, females are at a much higher risk of homicide by their male intimate partners. In 2015, the rate at which women were killed by an intimate partner[i] was 45 per million population – more than five times the rate at which men were killed by an intimate partner (9 per million population).

If you have the time or inclination, scroll down at the link for disturbing comparisons of the ages of female and male victims, and how they are related to their killers. I suspect these proportions have remained fairly stable too -- but people don't like to talk about it.

Uh, Happy New Year?