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Ben Schmidt

@bschmidt.bsky.social

6.6K followers 820 following 1.6K posts

VP of Information Design at Nomic building new interfaces to embeddings; former history professor/digital humanist. Bsky for humanities/dataviz-y things, @[email protected] for techy stuff, the bad place for business. https://benschmidt.org

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 7d

Hah, it could be a video game where you die if you hit a record highs starting in 1900 and it gets harder and harder as you go.

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 7d

Not that anyone would be able to understand that at a glance! Just fun to have additional channels

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 7d

Huh, and there's also two separate sets of *radiuses* you could use to encode -- from the circle that runs in the center of the torus that could encode hourly information, and also from the point in the middle of the donut hole.

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 7d

You'd really want a moving average, but there's some way I'm sure that one could model spring mechanics to spread that change out over years.

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 7d

I was sort of wondering if there's some way to use the tension of the spring -- the gap between the coils -- to encode year-to-year change? Like if it's warming stretch the spring out, if it's cooling compress it together

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 7d

Don't need to animate -- that could just look like a spring if there's detailed hourly city time-series

Reposted by Ben Schmidt

Karim Douieb @karimdouieb.bsky.social · 8d

🍩 What if climate looked like a donut? 🌍
Here’s a bunch of cities turned into a sweet dataviz experiment.

🟡 → comfy zone
🔴 → hot
🔵 → cold

Why a donut? Let me explain 👇

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 9d

I'll stay committed to the bit even if it doesn't work:

Junk line chart correlation purporting to show that Psychology is an outlier in low quality compared to the other social science.

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 9d

Yeah I shouldn't have put that in the title probably -- it's just the same joke about psychology being the worst discipline, but it doesn't really work there.

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 10d

Ten-year changes in majors by field -- when I first made this for the American Historical Association in 2018, history had the bottom slot, so slightly nice to see that it's rising.

A chart "Change in degrees, 2014-2024", with increases for Statistics and Computer science, and steep drops for most humanities and humanistic social sciences.

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 10d

Fortunately every person working in venture capital is a polymath with intellect of remarkable depth and breadth; otherwise I'd be in a real bind.

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 10d

Yeah humanities are indexed against peak because they all went down and have a peak from 2000-2008, but doing that for social sciences doesn't really make sense when some are at peak today. TBH probably indexing against peak never made sense, but I've been making that chart that way for years now.

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 10d

@pengzell.bsky.social asks about the social sciences, which I haven't looked at in a while. Indexing these against 2008 rather than peak, and struck that economics has been on a downslope for 6 years now, while psychology, the worst discipline, continues to rise rapidly.
bsky.app/profile/peng...

Chart titled 'Quality of Social Science Disciplines inversely correlated with change since 2008', showing that Criminology and Psychology have increased , economics is steady, and Polisci, anthro, IR, and Sociology are all down 30-40%

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 10d

Should be able to make one, although the grouping might be off... let me see

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 10d

Some more granular disciplinary data, by raw number of majors, showing the span since the 1990s. Most of the humanities are at about the same raw counts they were in the early 1990s. (And also the early 1970s, for that matter, although it's not in this chart because the data's harder to harmonize).

Line charts showing annual trends for sixteen humanities disciplines.

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 10d

History had a tiny increase in share 2023, its first since before the Great Recession-- this year it's back down, but really the story is that three of the four biggest fields -- English, history, and foreign languages -- remain in almost the same band, all less than half what they were in the 2000s

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 10d

Despite the gutting of the National Center for Educational Statistics, the dept of Ed *did* manage to release 2024 college major counts in the usual format, so I can run it through the same code I do every year. First off, the change since peak of the largest fields -- another year of drops.

A line chart captioned "The big humanities majors were mostly still falling in 2024", showing drops since 2008 for most humanities fields between 10% (Study of the Arts) to 68% (religion) with history, english, and foreign languages all clustered around 50-55%

Reposted by Ben Schmidt

Grace @gracekind.net · 21d

Talking loss functions at the FOSS luncheon

Reposted by Ben Schmidt

Robert Kelchen @robertkelchen.com · 13d

I shared some thoughts with @insidehighered.com about the first IPEDS data release since the Department of Education got DOGE-d. It's good to see the data coming out, but there are some concerns now and plenty more going forward.

www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

"I was not sure if we would see any new data coming out any time soon, so this is a good sign. But looking under the hood, there are clear signs that they’re struggling to do the same quality of data collection and posting as they have in the past,” said Robert Kelchen, head of the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Department at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, who flagged some of the issues in a Bluesky thread. “I worry about the ability to continue to get data out on time, especially with the changes to the proposed new admissions survey, which is going to be a massive data collection effort.”

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 18d

Headed to Brazil for the first time next month. I've got a pretty meager frame of reference. Any reading recommendations (fiction or non-fiction)?

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 22d

OTOH can’t wait to do some regressions across income by college major, finally about to normalize by creed and cranial size.

Reposted by Ben Schmidt

Dael Norwood @dael.bsky.social · 22d

Including a requirement that hires and students be reported to the federal government by “color” - not ethnicity, “color” - is really bringing the race science all the way back to the nadir.

Blake Emerson @blakeprof.bsky.social · 22d

These are the Trump Administration’s demands on UCLA, in addition to a 1.2 billion dollar fine, as reported by the LA Times today. I must note again that the Trump Administration’s attempt to use title vi to enforce conservative agenda items is flagrantly illegal.

3:164
• Make five years of payments — $200
million annually - and set up a $172 million fund for people with claims of civil rights violations.
• Ensure foreign students who are "anti-Western" will not be admitted.
• Pay for all costs of the settlement, including the fee for an outside monitor.
• Annually release demographic data for hires as well as students who have applied or have been admitted, broken down by "race, color, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests."
• Make a public statement declaring that transgender people's identities are no longer recognized.
• End gender-affirming care for minors at medical facilities.
• Give the government access to "all
UCLA staff, employees, facilities, documents, and data related to the agreement" not protected by attorney-client privilege.

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · Aug 31

This to me is the stronger case here -- seems quite plausible to me that chatbots end up leading to a *decrease* in suicide rates compared to, say, Reddit or Dostoevsky, because they make it harder to solicit pro-suicide feedback.

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · Aug 31

Yeah I've been thinking about Werther a lot. My assumption has been is that Werther *did* lead to more suicides--do you know differently @tedunderwood.me? This article here cited in wikipedia is a little disappointing; just digs up some 19C copycats. www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/...

The ‘Werther Effect’ of Goethe’s Werther: Anecdotal Evidence in Historical News Reports

Anecdotal evidence suggests a spike in suicides occurred after the publication of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774. Imitation suicides elicited by media portrayals of suicide have sinc...

www.tandfonline.com

Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · Aug 29

Open access now! dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/computa...

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