Five things I learned this week (Pride edition)

Pride Parade, San Francisco 2012. Photo by torbakhopper.

This week’s edition of “Five Things” is brought to you by the letter Q and all the colors of the rainbow! That’s right, it’s pride week in San Francsico and the city has been celebrating in its usual colorful, costumed, semi-clothed and totally fabulous fashion. So put on your hottest, tightest, most colorful dancing socks, and away we go!

• I just learned about Philosophy TV (via Mako). First on my list is Ned Hall and L.A. Paul discussing causality.

• According to this fascinating article by David H. Freedman in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly, the no-longer-so-notorious behavioral theories of B.F. Skinner are alive and well in the growing field of mobile health and dieting applications development. The article is well-written and raises a bunch of questions about everything from scientific ethics to the politics of technology to agency and theories of progress and well-being.

• SF Public Press, a non-profit local news organization, is running a series of articles called “Growing Smarter” about planning for population growth in the Bay Area over the next ten years. As part of the series, three members of the Cartography and GIS Education (CAGE) Lab of the UC Berkeley Geography Department collaborated with Public Press staff to generate a pretty phenomenal visualization of housing density in the region. Like all supergraphics, you can spend a lot of time discovering interesting relationships and stories in it.

• For you current or aspiring R users out there, I just came across this Cookbook for R by Winston Chang. It has some excellent code examples. Also, in the course of refining some figures for a paper earlier this week, I discovered that Hadley Wickham recently made some significant updates to ggplot2 and has released new documentation for the package.

• Amara, a.k.a. the program-formerly-known-as Universal Subtitles is an awesome piece of free (as in freedom and beer) subtitling and transcription software. I’ve been tinkering with it over the past few weeks in an effort to help design a system for crowdsourced video transcription and while it isn’t quite optimized for that purpose just yet, it seems terrific and I hope to find more reasons to use it soon.

Growth, inequality, and globalization

It’s a bit of a long haul, but if you aren’t scared of a few tables and a little bit of economic jargon, Thomas Pogge’s excellent essay in the current issue of Dissent de-bunks the idea that economic Globalization has reduced inequality during the past thirty years. These arguments aren’t new. The statistics aren’t even original (he pulled most of them from old UN reports). Nevertheless, it makes for a thought-provoking read. It also reiterates a point that a professor I taught for in the fall tried to hammer home to our undergraduates: “poverty is as poverty is measured.”