Utopia, you are standing in it!

Over at the Washington Post/Monkey Cage, Michael T. Heaney has an article about what he learned about DNC protesters. A few big points. First, Berners dominated the protest:

We went to demonstrations on many issues, including clean energy, police mistreatment of African Americans, immigration, poverty and peace. Our surveys on the first day of protests, July 24, found that 95 percent of the protesters who said they voted in the 2016 presidential primaries said they voted for Sanders, with only 4 percent voting for Clinton and 1 percent for other candidates. That’s quite a jump from what my collaborators (Seth Masket, Dara Strolovitch and Joanne Miller) and I found at the 2008 Democratic conventions, where protesters had supported then-Sen. Barack Obama (58 percent), Clinton (22 percent), Dennis Kucinich (6 percent), Mitt Romney (4 percent), Ron Paul (3 percent), Ralph Nader (3 percent) and others (4 percent).

Second, they feel Berned:

Of course, people who protest outside national…

By James Kwak

These days, some papers get more attention when they are in draft form than when they are published, in part because of the length of the review and publication cycle. Recall the Romer and Romer paper on the impact of tax changes, or the Philippon and Reshef paper on the financial sector, both of which made huge splashes years before they were finally published. My best-known paper also falls in that category. “The Value of Connections in Turbulent Times” began knocking around the Internet in 2013, and is only now being published by the Journal of Financial Economics—nine years after we began working on it, and at a time when the world seems to have completely moved on from its subject. (Note: that link will allow you to download the published version of the paper for free, but only until September 4, 2016. Thanks Elsevier, I guess.)

The paper, as…

Readers:

As I have mentioned in past posts, one of my favorite illustrators is Richard Johnson (photo, right). If you search on his name on my blog site, you will see several different examples of his work I have highlighted before.

Richard created the following infographic last year and it is titled From the Great Wall of China to the Southwest border: A historical guide to separation walls.

Here are Richard’s thoughts about creating this infographic.

A separation barrier/defensive wall is designed to limit the movement of people across a certain line or border, or to separate lands in order to protect people or cultures. They have been used for many thousands of years and built in a variety of materials, shapes and scales. Here are some famous examples and their maximum height to scale:

Later this week, I plan to show some data visualizations related to building a…

By Bill Blackwater

This is a cross-post from the Renewal blog – republished here with kind permission from the editors.

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership campaign was based on his moral authority, in turn said to be the key to renewing the party’s appeal in its traditional heartlands. But latest research on the psychological basis of morality, and its relationship to political views, suggests this was always misguided.

“The Labour Party is a moral crusade—or it is nothing.” Harold Wilson’s famous remarks, made at Labour’s Scottish Spring Conference in May 1964, still resonate in debates on the party’s direction. The journalist Tom Clark summed this up during last summer’s leadership contest, with reference to the decision of Labour’s front bench to abstain on a vote on welfare cuts. Taking up the options Wilson set out, he put it that the three mainstream candidates had “plumped for nothing”. Hence the…

There are about 300 blogs on the list, although I am weeding out those which are no longer active or have removed public access to sitemeters. (Let me know if I weed out yours by mistake or get your stats wrong).

Every month I get queries from people wanting their own blog included. I encourage and am happy to respond to queries but have prepared a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) people can check out. Have a look at NZ Blog Rankings FAQ. This is particularly helpful to those wondering how to set up sitemeters. Please note, the system is automatic and relies on blogs having sitemeters which allow public access to the stats.

Here are the rankings of New Zealand blogs with publicly available statistics for July 2016. Ranking is by visit numbers. I have listed the blogs in the table below, together with monthly visits and page view…