The FBI has finally released crime statistics for 2023!
Let's have a short thread.
First thing up is recent violent crime trends:
Now let's focus in on homicides.
The homicide statistics split by race show the same distribution they have for years.
As with every crime, it's still men doing the killing, but it's also largely men doing the dying.
What about Hispanics? Their data is still a mess, but here it is if you're interested.
The age-crime curve last year looked pretty typical. How about this year?
Same as always. Victims and offenders still have highly similar, relatively young ages.
Everything else, from locations to motives to weapons is pretty similar to previous years. What's different is that the OP might show incorrect numbers.
For the past two years, the FBI has silently updated their numbers after about two weeks.
You can use the web archive to see that the data from the OP is the data shown at release last year, and the data from 2023 is the 2022 data with the FBI's suggested reductions (i.e., -11.6% homicides, -2.8% aggravated assaults, -0.3% robberies, etc.).
But you can see on their site now that they've adjusted the numbers up, so the reduction they suggested has brought us down to a figure that's less impressive than my chart shows. The difference isn't huge so I showed the OP without updating to their new data.
For reference, 2022 as reported then had a homicide rate of 6.3/100k, and they silently updated that to 7.48/100k. The 2023 data they provided today actually has a murder rate of 6.61/100k, higher than last year's initially-reported number, but lower than the updated number. To make matters worse, if you use their Expanded Homicides Report, you get a rate of 5.94 for 2022 and 5.24 for 2023.
Methodology matters and we get to see inconsistency in this year's data, not even data that's been updated or anything. It's a mess, so take everything with a grain of salt and, in the interest of caution, only interpret trends. Trends are mostly common between all data sources even if the absolute magnitudes are off, constantly updated, etc.
The effects of charter schools on student test scores are meta-analytically estimated to be small.
In this study, the largest estimated effect was estimated to be equivalent to ~1.35 IQ points, for mathematics scores, which consistently showed larger effects than reading scores.
Similarly, the estimated effect of parents' preferred schools and of elite public secondary schools on test scores is around zero.
More interestingly, it seems charter school openings lead to competition that marginally boosts non-charter student performance and reduces absenteeism by very small degrees:
This analysis has several advantages compared to earlier ones.
The most obvious is the whole-genome data combined with a large sample size. All earlier whole-genome heritability estimates have been made using smaller samples, and thus had far greater uncertainty.
The next big thing is that the SNP and pedigree heritability estimates came from the same sample.
This can matter a lot.
If one sample has a heritability of 0.5 for a trait and another has a heritability of 0.4, it'd be a mistake to chalk the difference up to the method.
The original source for the Medline p-values explicitly compared the distributions in the abstracts and full-texts.
They found that there was a kink such that positive results had excess lower-bounds above 1 and negative results had excess upper-bounds below 1.
They then explicitly compared the distributional kinkiness from Medline to the distributions from an earlier paper that was similar to a specification curve analysis.
That meant comparing Medline to a result that was definitely not subject to p-hacking or publication bias.
I got blocked for this meager bit of pushback on an obviously wrong idea lol.
Seriously:
Anyone claiming that von Neumann was tutored into being a genius is high on crack. He could recite the lines from any page of any book he ever read. That's not education!
'So, what's your theory on how von Neumann could tell you the exact weights and dimensions of objects without measuring tape or a scale?'
'Ah, it was the education that was provided to him, much like the education provided to his brothers and cousins.'
'How could his teachers have set him up to connect totally disparate fields in unique ways, especially given that every teacher who ever talked about him noted that he was much smarter than them and they found it hard to teach him?'