Miscellaneous, November

Alan Krueger finds that "nearly half of prime age men who are not in the labor force take pain medication on a daily basis.”

Our World in Data blog: "Today, the world can produce almost three times as much cereal from a given area of land than it did in 1961.” ​

Happy, hapless, perhaps, mishap, happen, and haphazard all come from from the same Norse root "hap" – meaning "chance”. 

Canada does remarkably well on Pisa: "If Canadian provinces entered Pisa tests as separate countries, three of them, Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec, would be in the top five places for science in the world … Within three years of arriving, the Pisa tests show the children of new migrants have scores as high as the rest of their schoolmates. It makes Canada one of the few countries where migrant children achieve at a level similar to their non-migrant counterparts. Another distinguishing feature is that Canada's teachers are well paid by international standards - and entry into teaching is highly selective."

Taiwan’s brain drain: "To add to Taiwan’s woes, graduate salaries have stagnated. In 1999, a university graduate could expect an average monthly salary of around $900. By 2016, this had risen to just $925. “If China is growing at 6 percent a year and Taiwan is growing at 2 percent a year, which is going to be the most attractive place to go to stake out your career?”"

Inside Higher Ed reports on the targeting of and threats against scholars: "Grollman and others described a common cycle of a professor’s comments on a politicized topic first appearing on a right-wing website such as Campus Reform, which is supported by the conservative Leadership Institute. It’s soon followed by other, similar websites and news outlets and, finally, Fox News. Then, they said, “ensue the death threats, the threats of sexual violence, calls for them to be fired and lose their jobs. This is not a whimsical thing -- there’s an actual system in place.”

White nationalists are getting DNA tested and don’t like the results: “Specialists both inside and outside these companies [like 23andMe] recognize that the geopolitical boundaries we use now are pretty new, and so consumers may be using imprecise categories when thinking about their own genetic ancestry within the sweeping history of human migration. And users’ ancestry results can change depending on the dataset to which their genetic material is being compared — a fact which some Stormfront users said they took advantage of, uploading their data to various sites to get a more “white” result."

Politico reports on voter machines and hacking: "they have no idea what happened, or [way] of knowing. I'm not suggesting votes were switched or voters were deleted from voter files, but the point is the security is so lax and so bad that they have no way of going back and doing the forensics and saying one way or the other.” 
And: "'Unhackable' is absurd on its face," Braun said. "If the Russians and Chinese and whoever else can get into NSA and Lockheed Martin and JP Morgan, they absolutely can get into Kalamazoo County or the state of Ohio or the [voting machine] vendor.”

Occupations with the highest proportion of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians.