Comment on Phillip Davis’s “The Market for Scholarly Articles”
January 28, 2009
As Phillip Davis writes (reprinted in the IMS Bulletin), scholarly authors are driven to publish in journals because that is the way to have their work noticed and readers read journals because these provide some measure of quality assurance. Davis is wrong, however, on multiple counts, when he concludes: “This system is not intended to be fair and democratic, but it saves the time of the reader and functions to help consensus building in science. For those who feel that this perpetuates hegemony, let them eat cake.”
The academic publishing system is intended to be fair; the current system (though better than nothing) performs poorly as a time saving tool for the reader; “consensus forming” (i.e., suppressing non-conventional thought) is not a legitimate function of a scientific communication channel; and, finally, there is no reason to dismiss people who are unhappy with the current system with “let them eat cake”: there is a better way to run the scholarly publishing system.
Palestinian and Israeli fatalities by month 2000-08
January 26, 2009
The following chart was generated using B’Tselem data. The data does not cover December 2008. The number of Israeli deaths was higher than the number of Palestinian death on the same month once during 99 months covered (June, 2001).
The totals for the years and for the entire period are:
| Period | Israeli | Palestinian |
| 2000 (Sept. – Dec.) | 41 | 279 |
| 2001 | 191 | 469 |
| 2002 | 420 | 1032 |
| 2003 | 185 | 588 |
| 2004 | 108 | 828 |
| 2005 | 50 | 197 |
| 2006 | 23 | 662 |
| 2007 | 13 | 390 |
| 2008 (Jan. – Nov.) | 31 | 452 |
| Total | 1062 | 4897 |
Household income distribution, 2007
January 13, 2009
The graph below shows a histogram of the household income distribution in the US in 2007. It was constructed using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), Table HINC-06. I smoothed the table by merging pairs of $2,500-wide intervals into $5,000-wide intervals, since the narrow intervals showed marked oscillation, as people apparently tend to report their income in multiples of $5,000.
The three vertical dashed lines indicate the 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles. The corresponding values are $25,100, $50,300 and $88,400, respectively.
The following table gives the deciles of the distribution:
| Percentile | 10 | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 | 60 | 70 | 80 | 90 |
| Income, $1000’s | 12.3 | 20.8 | 29.8 | 39.4 | 50.3 | 62.7 | 78.6 | 100.8 | 141.9 |
All percentile points were calculated by interpolating linearly within the income bins.
Pro Bono Statistics 