Why infant mortality higher in U.S. than Europe?

The US has a substantial – and poorly understood – infant mortality disadvantage relative to peer countries. We combine comprehensive micro-data on births and infant deaths in the US from 2000 to 2005 with comparable data from Austria and Finland to investigate this disadvantage. Differential reporting of births near the threshold of viability can explain up to 40% of the US infant mortality disadvantage. Worse conditions at birth account for 75% of the remaining gap relative to Finland, but only 30% relative to Austria. Most striking, the US has similar neonatal mortality but a substantial disadvantage in postneonatal mortality. This postneonatal mortality disadvantage is driven almost exclusively by excess inequality in the US: infants born to white, college-educated, married US mothers have similar mortality to advantaged women in Europe. Our results suggest that high mortality in less advantaged groups in the postneonatal period is an important contributor to the US infant mortality disadvantage.

From this research paper (PDF).

The contour of money

Meanwhile, the bullet train has sucked the country’s workforce into Tokyo, rendering an increasingly huge part of the country little more than a bedroom community for the capital. One reason for this is a quirk of Japan’s famously paternalistic corporations: namely, employers pay their workers’ commuting costs. Tax authorities don’t consider it income if it’s less than ¥100,000 a month – so Shinkansen commutes of up to two hours don’t sound so bad. New housing subdivisions filled with Tokyo salarymen subsequently sprang up along the Nagano Shinkansen route and established Shinkansen lines, bringing more people from further away into the capital.

The Shinkansen’s focus on Tokyo, and the subsequent emphasis on profitability over service, has also accelerated flight from the countryside. It’s often easier to get from a regional capital to Tokyo than to the nearest neighbouring city. Except for sections of the Tohoku Shinkansen, which serves northeastern Japan, local train lines don’t always accommodate Shinkansen rolling stock, so there are often no direct transfer points between local lines and Shinkansen lines. The Tokaido Shinkansen alone now operates 323 trains a day, taking 140 million fares a year, dwarfing local lines. This has had a crucial effect on the physical shape of the city. As a result of this funnelling, Tokyo is becoming even denser and more vertical – not just upward, but downward. With more Shinkansen passengers coming into the capital, JR East has to dig ever deeper under Tokyo Station to create more platforms.

From The Guardian on the effects of the Shinkansen bullet train on Tokyo (h/t Marginal Revolution).

We often analyze architecture and urban layouts for their purely functional and aesthetic utility, but it's just as important to understand the interplay between money and geography. They shape each other.

Soundtrack for Her

Grooveshark has posted Arcade Fire's soundtrack for the movie Her.

It was odd this was never put out on CD. Granted, no one buys recorded music anymore, but Arcade Fire has a reasonably large following. At a minimum I would've thought the soundtrack would have been released to one of the streaming music services.

Ah, well. Excuse me while I listen to this alone in my high-waisted pants while asking Siri over and over if she loves me.

(via Rands in Repose)

Information previews in modern UI's

[I don't know if Facebook invented this (and if they didn't, I'm sure one of my readers will alert me to who did), but it's certainly the service which has used it to greatest effect which I suppose is the case for anything they put to use given their scale.]

One problem with embedded videos as opposed to text online has always been the high cost of sampling the video. Especially for interviews, I'd almost always rather just have the transcript than be forced to wade through an entire video. Scanning text is more efficient than scanning online video.

Facebook has, for some time now, autoplayed videos in the News Feed with the audio on mute. Not only does it catch your eye, it automatically gives you a motion preview of the video itself (without annoying you with the audio), thus lowering the sampling cost. To play the video, you click on it and it activates the audio. I'm sure the rollout of this UI change increased video clicks in the News Feed quite a bit. Very clever. I've already seen this in many mobile apps and expect it to become a standard for video online.

[It's trickier when videos include pre-roll ads; it's not a great user experience to be enticed to watch a video by an autoplayed clip, then to be dropped into an ad as soon as you act on your interest.]

Someday, the autoplayed samples could be even smarter; perhaps the video uploader could define in and out points for a specific sample, or perhaps the algorithm which selects the sample could be smarter about the best moment to select.

It's not just video where sampling costs should be minimized. Twitter shows a title, image, and excerpts for some links in its Timelines, helping you to preview what you might get for clicking on the link. They show these for some but not all links. I suspect they'd increase clickthroughs on those links quite a bit if they were more consistent in displaying those preview Twitter cards.

Business Insider and Buzzfeed linkbait-style headlines are a text analogue, albeit one with a poor reputation among some. Given the high and increasing competition for user attention at every waking moment, it's not clear that services can leave any such tactical stones unturned.

Get yourself some British TV

If you want to catch the original before watching the American remake, which David Fincher directs for HBO (Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn will handle the scripts), you can now get the British TV series Utopia on all-region Blu-ray discs. Amazon has it listed as available from a third party seller as well, though at a higher price.

I ordered a copy, can't wait until it shows up.

Speaking of British TV, Jon Hamm has agreed to star in the 90 minute Black Mirror Christmas Special. If you missed season one of Black Mirror, a sort of Twilight Zone-esque anthology of stories exploring the dark side of modern technology, it's on PAL DVD. I subscribe to DirecTV and by some act of God they happened to license the first two seasons. I don't know how I heard about the series but thankfully programmed my DVR to capture the series.

BBC and Channel 4 in the UK really need to get with the times and just release their great TV series day-and-date in the U.S., whether on BBC America or another channel.

Also, unless you're truly befuddled by British accents, watch the original Broadchurch, not its weaker American remake Gracepoint.