Sleep

A recent report published by the National Center of Health Statistics examines sleep patterns in the United States and the association between sleep and other health indicators. Interestingly, most (63%) people get the recommended 7-8 hours of sleep each night, but this leaves a substantial minority (about 38%) getting less sleep than recommended and a small proportion (9%) sleeping 9+ hours a night. Those getting 7-8 hours of sleep have the lowest rates of smoking, inactivity, and obesity.

Of course, it’s hard to say that sleeping too little or too much makes you obese. It might be that being obese makes it harder to sleep. Or it could be that other health conditions both interfere with sleep and exercise. Nonetheless, other research suggests that people who don’t get enough sleep eat more during the day.

Bottom line: A growing number of studies suggest that getting enough sleep is an important part of maintaining good health.

West Virginia Primary

I did farily well predicting the North Carolina and Indiana primaries just using exit poll and census data, especially if you ignore my delegate calculations. (Doh!) Let's see how dumb my luck was...

I worked under the assumption that voting tendencies by race and gender would hold steady. And the table above shows that they did. If anything, Clinton grabbed a larger share of the white vote than expected. This was offset by the fact that the voting rates for whites were much lower than for blacks. Obama is clearly drawing many new minority voters to the polls.

West Virginia has an exceptionally large proportion of its white population that never went to college. We can expect these voters to like Clinton over Obama, but lets see if they actually go to the polls now that Clinton's chances of receiving the nomination appear severely dented.

Bottom line: Keeping with what so far as worked pretty well, I predict that Clinton will win West Virginia with 58% of the vote. Currently polls suggest an even larger win. Let's see who's right.

College Squeeze

It seems that the college admissions game continues to get more crazed every year. This is true not only among elite schools, but also public universities. Two issues make getting into a top college much more difficult in recent years. The first is the remarkable growth in postsecondary schooling. Nowadays, most high school graduates continue their educations after receiving their diplomas. Another factor has to do with the number of babies born approximately 18 years ago.














Between 1985 and 1990 the number of babies born in the United States increased from 3.67 million to 4 million. That meant that those applying for college this year were competing with a lot more people than those applying just five years ago. The situation will be even worse next year, but should start to get better in 2010.

Those of you with 7 year olds might start working on buffing up those GPAs and test scores ASAP.



Tomorrow...West Virginia predictions.

Family Life

An interesting trend in family life, one that almost everyone knows about, is the growth in single parent families. So, it isn't much surprise to anyone that many households (60 percent in 2006) with a female householder contain children. It might be slightly more surprising to know that almost half of households with an unmarried male householder have children. Some might see this as evidence for a sudden increase in men taking custody of children in the event of divorce. It is not. No, this is because of an increase in unmarried couples living together with children, sometimes their own children, sometimes children from a previous relationship.


















What I find surprising in the above graph is that the household type that is least likely to have children is a married couple household. You might think then that most children are raise in single parent families. This would be wrong...By far, most children live in married couple households. This is possible because most households, with children or not, are maintained by a married couple.

Trends in Religious Fundamentalism

Reading various online sources, I see that many have impressions about whether religious fundamentalism or religious liberalism is increasing or on the decline. The General Social Survey, conducted by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, has asked a representative sample of United States residents about their religious beliefs in every interview since 1972. In the early 1970s most responded that they had moderate beliefs and less than 20 percent claimed to hold liberal beliefs. From the early 1970s through the mid 1980s religious fundamentalism (or at least the proportion claiming to be fundamentalist) was on the rise and there was a substantial decline in moderates. Since that time, the proportion claiming to be liberal is increasing.













I'm not sure whether these trends actually represent real declines in the proportion holding fundamentalist beliefs (e.g. that the bible is the literal word of the creator) or if it reflects growing distaste for the "fundamentalist" label as it is now associated with religious extremism and intolerance. It's hardly scientific evidence, but I found identifying a blog that has a positive spin on "religious fundamentalism" to be difficult, while finding one that is religiously conservative is easy. I think the increase in the proportion reporting that they are liberal (despite the fact that this term is not especially popular) reflects real changes in beliefs.