American views on gun control - shifting at last?

The New York Times reports today that a recent Times/CBS News poll appears to show that Americans have - at last! - begun to agree that gun laws need tightening:

[T]he poll found that a majority of Americans — 54 percent — think gun control laws should be tightened, up markedly from a CBS News poll last April that found that only 39 percent backed stricter laws.

The rise in support for stricter gun laws stretched across political lines, including an 18-point increase among Republicans. A majority of independents now back stricter gun laws.

It gets better: support for background checks at all gun sales (including those by unlicensed sellers_ and a ban on high-capacity magazines is increasing.

But since this is a blog about data use, what's wrong with the chart? Two things - it doesn't say when the reporting period starts, just shows two dates in the middle, 2005 and 2010. And while it appears that the scale starts at 0, it's possible that it doesn't. So the chart could be better. The data give me some cause for hope.

The Guardian has put together a very good chart on varying state gun laws. It's here.

More 2013 predictions - this time it's design trends

Gizmodo has published a list of 13 design trends in electronics for 2013. Among them are: 

• Flat screens;
• Touch screens;
• In what feels as if it's becoming a regular, and quick, cycle, designs for specific platforms rather than the web;
•  And designing for humans - where the experience is as important as the looks. If Gannon Burgett's link doesn't interest you, take a look at this article by John McPhee in The New Yorker (available, behind a paywall, here). McPhee is writing about structuring long written work, but tucked inside it is a fascinating exegesis on the text editing (not word processing) program he uses, Kedit.

Our genetic quirks

Two stories came out last week about two curious features in our body chemistry. On Wednesday,  the journal Nature explained the age old mystery: why do our fingers and toes wrinkle during a bath? So we can pick things up, of course!

Laboratory tests confirmed a theory that wrinkly fingers improve our grip on wet or submerged objects, working to channel away the water like the rain treads in car tyres.

On Thursday, the Atlantic.com ran this story about the iron we need - and that can poison us. Some of us carry a hereditary condition called hemochromatosis:

a genetic disease leading to a toxic accumulation of iron in his organs. A modern manifestation of an ancient DNA mutation, this disorder can be traced to a single unknown ancestor who lived millennia ago. This mutation allowed her (or him) to more readily absorb iron from food, which may have unexpectedly aided survival in lean times -- possibly at the expense of iron-overload in later generations. . . . [The mutation is found in] nearly one in ten individuals of northern European ancestry.

There are lots of mysteries: why did the mutation arise? Do you need two copies to develop the disease, or just one? Where did it arise and how did it spread? Why is is so common in people of Northern European descent? It's a great story - evolutionary medicine with a modern example.

Drought in Illinois could have some surprising, and unpleasant, effects

Illinois, like much of the rest of the Midwest, is still in the grip of a drought. The water levels in Lake Michigan, among many other places, are low. One unpleasant possible side effect, reported by the environmental web site grist.com: the Chicago river may reverse direction and empty into the lake - carrying tons of sewage with it. The good news: new locks and seawalls may limit the amount of water from the polluted river that ends up in the lake. On the other hand, what happens to downtown Chicago?

imaage Andrew Stern June 2, 2010 via blogs.reuters.com

In case you missed it Friday - Google trends shows the gun control conversation is continuing

Google Trends is showing a continuing uptick in searches using terms related to gun control or gun regulation. The letters on the graph indicate newspaper articles about various aspects. There's a good analysis of the data by Rebecca Rosen of the Atlantic here.

I will be traveling over the next several weeks and expect to return to this issue in some detail in February.

Photos of dust storms in Australia

That cloud? It's dust, about to roll over Western Australia. You can see more pictures, via The Atlantic Wire, here. And at Grist.com, here. Tough week to be in Australia.

Google Flu Trends

Google Flu Trends tracks flu-related search terms in selected countries around the world. (Notice that certain European countries, including the UK and Ireland, are not included.) I've added a screenshot of the world wide map, but an interactive feature allows you to look at a country, or its states or regions more closely.

The site tracks searches for flu-related topics because:

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries are added together. We compared our query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in different countries and regions around the world. Our results have been published in the journal Nature.

(The links will take you to a pdf of the article.) Or you can click here and get a snapshot of the graph comparing Google Flu Trends estimate with US surveillance data. The difference? Google's maps are updated daily; in the US, the CDC updates its flu surveillance reports weekly. The CDC's flu site has a lot more detail, as you might expect.

Thanks to Jocelyn Bowie for the tip.