mientras países como Polonia o Reino Unido tardaron más de noventa años en reducir a la mitad la tasa de fertilidad (de seis hijos a tres por mujer), otros como Bangladesh o Irán han tardado apenas la décima parte (entre veinte y diez años). Una evolución salvaje y precoz.

Slack has finally decided to close down their IRC and XMPP gateways.

True to form, you can only read their announcement if you already have a Slack account and are logged in to a workspace.

Here's the gist of their announcement:

As Slack has evolved over the years, we've built features and capabilities —
like Shared Channels, Threads, and emoji reactions (to name a few) — that the
IRC and XMPP gateways aren't able to handle. Our priority is to provide a
secure and high-quality experience across all platforms, and so the time has
come to close the gateways.

They're of course being economical with the truth here.

Para monitoriar la evolución de las reservas de agua.

Carta del rey de Francia a su hermano-primo el rey de España, acerca de la monarquía constitucional y sus ventajas.

Una buena noticia para la Neutralidad de la red en la UE

You know those graphics that use icons of people to represent units or counts of people? The Wee People font by Alberto Cairo and Scott Klein makes it easier to use such icons on the web. Just add the CSS file and you’re ready to go.

In a recent article on food deserts, Richard Florida had this quick throwaway line that caught my eye, with my emphasis added:

There are deeper reasons, again tied to class, that enable affluent and educated households to put this nutritional information to use. For one, they simply have more time and resources to devote to their health and well-being.

This struck me as an interesting and unlikely to be true claim. Higher income and more educated households work more, and therefore you would think they have less free time for things like cooking dinner and healthy behaviors. Indeed, this struck me as a case of a bias I identified in a recent post: we look for the most complementary explanations for the behaviors of lower socioeconomic status people. Let's look at the data.

Shutterstock

In Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst's paper "Measuring Trends in Leisure: the Allocation of Time Over Five Decades", they use American Time Use Survey data from 1965 to 2003. They found that for both men and women, more education is associated with less time devoted to leisure. A man with less than 12 years of schooling has 116.34 hours of leisure a week and a man with 16 or more hours has 101.44. This difference isn't due to non-market work activities, like chores around the house, which more educated men do a little bit more of. The difference is due to greater work hours for more educated men. Similar patterns exist for women, with less educated women having more leisure time.

Interestingly, this gap has grown over time. The gap in leisure time by education used to be much smaller, resulting in what Aguiar and Hurst call "a growing inequality in leisure that is the mirror image of the growing inequality of wages and expenditures".

You can see a similar story about time availability when it comes to spending time with children. In their paper "Parental Education and Parental Time with Children", Jonathan Guryan, Erik Hurst, and Melissa Kearney find that more educated and higher earning men and women spend more time with their children. This is true when you control for a variety of demographic characteristics, and when you control for employment status. Consistent with the other research, they find that the greater time spent on child care comes out of less leisure and somewhat less home production.

This is a lot of information for a quick throwaway sentence from Richard Florida, but I think his sentiment is a popular one. In fact I think it reflects a very fundamental bias that I discussed in my past previous post, which I call the "complimentary bias". People search for and favor theories of behavior and outcomes which are complimentary to groups they want to raise in status. For liberals, this is low socioeconomic status households. Unfortunately, this bias reduces our understanding of the actual reasons for different outcomes and behaviors.

Salsas, salsas, y más salsas

"Firefly III" is a (self-hosted) manager for your personal finances. It can help you keep track of your expenses and income, so you can spend less and save more. Firefly III supports the use of budgets, categories and tags. It can import data from external sources and it has many neat financial reports available. Here are some screenshots:

I’ve written in the past (twice) about how to streamline the writing process when using LaTeX. Since then, I’ve found that I enjoy writing even more when I don’t have to reach for LaTeX at all. By reaching first for Markdown, then for LaTeX when necessary, writing is easier and more enjoyable.

Pandoc:
https://pandoc.org/

Python siempre me gustó como lenguaje

Code formatter, usable as plugin inside the editor or hookable into git (configuring it into any required package.json)