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The blog is to signpost people ahead of the summer holidays where to go for up to date info on water quality, plus info on our sampling programme, highlighting river water quality challenges and explaining discounted samples.

The Environment Agency conducts weekly sampling during the bathing water season, which spans from May to September. Across the UK, there are 424 designated bathing water sites, 49 of these sit within Wessex. Each one of these sites is …

Our blog on 1 February explained how we approach monitoring, sampling and testing of bathing waters and our approach to keeping public informed and warned when there are short term risks of pollution which bathers would rightly want to be …

That's higher than most recent polls, though not by much. From today's NBC News post by Alexandra Marquez: More than half of American voters—52% [with a sampling error of +/-3% -EV]—say they or someone in their household owns a gun, per the latest NBC News national poll. That's the highest share of voters who say…

Original date of publication on the UACES Ideas on Europe platform: 13 December 2019 Introductory Remarks Winter bliss has arrived in Northern Europe which brings not only a festive mood but also an overall intellectual propensity towards certain concepts echoing seasonal scenery. Snowball effect (NB! not snowball sampling) is the one which comes into mind […]
The post Science Diplomacy Joins the Snowballing Practice Turn appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Somewhere along the way, the idea of “the American Dream” became constricted, and started referring purely to economic success: that is, the idea that if you just worked hard, you could become at least comfortably well-off, or even rich. Here is a sampling of examples. Mrinal Mishra, Jonathan Fu, and Steven Ongen recently published a … Continue reading No, The American Dream Is not about Getting Rich
The post No, The American Dream Is not about Getting Rich first appeared on Conversable Economist.

 In 1951, the Gallup Poll asked "Comparing your present family circumstances with those when you were a child, would you say you are better off, or worse off, than your parents were then?"  They asked it again in 1991, and other organizations asked it in 1994 (twice) and 2016.  The results:                    better      worse    same (vol.)Feb 1951       60%         24%      14%Dec 1991      78%         12%        9%Aug 1994      65%        22%      11%Sep  1994      72%        21%        6%Dec  2016      72%        20%        7%The distributions are all about the same except for 1991, when people were more positive.  I can't think of a plausible reason that opinions would change that much between December 1991 and 1994 (economic conditions were similar, but somewhat better in 1994), so I think that difference is at least partly sampling error.  The important point is that opinions weren't more pessimistic in 2016 than in 1950 or 1994.  It's often suggested that Americans always felt like they were making economic progress from generation to generation until recently, and that the loss of that sense has led to a variety of social and political problems, like "deaths of despair," the decline in rates of marriage and childbearing, and the rise of Trump.  But I don't think that's the case--people are discontented with some aspects of society, but most still believe that there's an upward trend in their standard of living.[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research] 

 In September 2015, a Pew survey asked "Thinking about the way things are going in politics today...on the issues that matter to you would you say your side has been winning more often than it's been losing, or losing more often than it's been winning?"  The question has been repeated a number of times since then, most recently in September 2022.  The figure shows the percent who said that their side was generally winning broken down by party--the colors distinguish between supporters of the President's party (Democrats in 2015 and 2016, Republicans 2017-2020, and Democrats in 2021-2).  Unsurprisingly, supporters of the President's party are more likely to think that they are winning than supporters of the opposition party are.  The unexpected part is that the views of supporters of the president's party are more variable--in the opposition party, "winning" ranged from 14-22%, which is probably not much more than would be expected from sampling variation; in the president's party, it ranges from 31% to 69%.  The highest value occurred in May 2019.  Trump supporters generally say that his greatest accomplishments were the tax bill, the confirmation of Supreme Court Justices, and the Abraham accords, and maybe the program to develop Covid vaccines, none of which occurred around that time.  The most plausible explanation for the positive feelings among Republicans is the release of the Mueller report, which was generally regarded as a political victory for Trump because it wasn't as damaging as many had expected.  On this interpretation, Republicans had the greatest sense of success after avoiding a loss rather than after a positive accomplishment, which shows the strength of negative partisanship.    [Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

 There have been numerous efforts to define "woke" in the past week or two.  A common problem with the ones I've seen is that they have been too elaborate, treating it as if it were a political ideology rather than general current of opinion.   I would define it as an inclination to think that discrimination is the primary cause of group inequalities (except when a generally favored group is on the bad side, as with men being overrepresented in prison).   With this definition, we have a question that can be used to measure the growth of "wokeness." The General Social Survey asks:  "On the average (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think these differences are mainly due to discrimination?" Agreement was generally declining among both whites and blacks until about 2014.   but there have been large increases in 2016, 2018, and 2021.  White agreement is at its highest level ever, and black agreement is almost equal to its highest level.   Of course, opinions are affected by experience and other evidence, but those haven't changed dramatically in the last ten years---that leaves what I called the "inclination."   Ibram X. Kendi's remarks are interesting in this context:  "The racist answer is 'no'—it presumes that racist discrimination no longer exists and that racial inequities are the result of something being wrong with Black people. The anti-racist answer is 'yes'—it presumes that nothing is wrong or right, inferior or superior, about any racial group, so the explanation for racial disparities must be discrimination."  That is, he doesn't appeal to evidence, but to principle:  "presumes" and "must be."The previous figure showed that the turn towards wokeness occurred among both blacks and whites.  It also occurred among both more and less educated whites, although it was stronger among college graduates:This is normal--usually changes of opinion are similar among different groups, although there may be subtle differences.  But the pattern by ideology is different:The GSS asks people to rate their ideology on a seven-point scale:  I divided it into three groups, very and somewhat liberal; slightly liberal, moderate and slightly conservative; and somewhat and very conservative.  Liberals and moderates have both moved substantially towards agreement, but there has been little change among conservatives.  There's a good deal of sampling error in year-to-year changes in subgroups, but agreement rose among conservatives between 2014 and 2016, but then declined in 2018 and 2021.  So the division over "wokeness" is not just something that has attracted the attention of political elites and people on Twitter:  it is clearly visible in the public.  

 A couple of years ago, I wrote about a question asked in 1974 and 1976 and revived in 2001--"how much trust and confidence do you have in the American people as a whole when it comes to making judgments under our democratic system about the issues facing our country--a great deal, a fair amount, not very much, or none at all?" I recently discovered that this was part of a series of questions about "trust and confidence" in various things related to politics.  I'll consider some of them today.  First, the updated figure for the American people:There is a decline, which seems to have been especially sharp between about 2010 and 2015, but has continued since then.  (The one relatively high figure in recent years was in a survey taken just days after Joe Biden's inauguration).  Next, one on trust and confidence in "men and women in political life in this country who either hold or are running for political office."It's a similar downward trend, but there is more year-to-year variation.  It was unusually high in 2008--maybe that was because of Obama.  It also rose during the Trump administration, which seems surprising, but might have been because of Democrats uniting in opposition to Trump.  But overall, they track each other closely--the correlation is 0.84.  Next, one on trust and confidence in "the government of the state where you live when it comes to handling state problems."There is a downward trend, but it's weaker than with the two previous questions.  There are some unusual cases--very high in 1998, then low in 2003 and 2009-11.  The 2009-11 figures are probably because of the recession, which squeezed state government finances.  Economic circumstances may also have contributed to the high in 1998, but I can't think of any reason for the 2003 lowFinally, trust and confidence in "local governments in the area where you live when it comes to handling local problems."  There's no discernible trend, and not much year-to-year variation (by my rough calculation, not much more than you'd expect from sampling error alone).  The figures for 2021 and 2023 are the lowest since the 1970s, so maybe a downward trend is starting to emerge, but 2022 was at a normal level.  People are often more favorable towards things that are close to them (for example, the local schools vs. schools in general), but the differences here involve the trends.  You might expect confidence in "the American people" to be highest, and that was true in the earlier surveys, but is no longer true today.  My interpretation is that the declines for the first two questions are a reaction to conflict and polarization in national politics--ironically, confidence in state and local governments has held up because people pay less attention to them.[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

 I didn't intend to post again this soon, but I read a story in the New York Times and saw this passage:  "In the United States, surveys point to declining civics understanding among adults [which leads] to weaker social discourse and faith in public institutions."  I don't think that there has been a general decline in civics understanding, or that lack of civics understanding in the public is a major source of the problems with our political culture, so I wanted to check their evidence.  On clicking the link, I found it led to a legitimate survey sponsored by the Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the report was called "Americans' Civics Knowledge Drops on First Amendment and Branches of Government."  So far, that seems to support the statement in the Times.  On reading further, I saw that the drop was relative to the previous year (2021), and it was dramatic--e. g., when asked what rights were guaranteed by the First Amendment, 20% named freedom of the press, down from 50% in 2021.  Going back further, 42% mentioned freedom of the press in 2020, and 14% in 2017.  So either we've had a big decline or a small increase in knowledge, depending on your starting year.  Something is wrong--you might get a large increase in knowledge on issues that suddenly come into the news (e. g., knowing where Ukraine is located), but this is something that people learn in school, if they learn it.  So you're not going to get large changes from year to year--you could get large changes over a long period of time, but they would involve the accumulation of small changes in the same direction. What explains the differences between the years?  With open-ended questions, the number who give responses is affected by the amount of encouragement they get from the interviewer--e. g., if someone says "I don't know," whether the interviewer says something like "just your best guess is OK."  This is particularly relevant to the First Amendment question, since multiple answers are possible.   Suppose someone answers "freedom of speech" and then pauses:   the interviewer could move to the next question, or could ask "anything else?" So my guess is that the exact instructions given to the interviewers changed over the years (or possibly the way they were paid in a way that changed their incentives--like hourly rate versus completed interviews).  The site has a report on sampling and weighting, but nothing on the exact instructions, so I can't check. You would think that someone involved in the project would realize that the numbers looked strange, and checked to see if the apparent changes in knowledge actually reflected some change in the survey procedures.  But they just presented them as straightforward changes in knowledge:  for example, the 2020 survey report was titled "Amid Pandemic and Protests, Civics Survey Finds Americans Know More of Their Rights."  I'm not saying that it's impossible that there were large year-to-year increases and declines in knowledge--just that it would be unusual enough to deserve close examination before saying that it happened.   

 On March 30, Nicholas Kristof had wrote   "Survey data indicates that married couples on average report more happiness, build more wealth, live longer and raise more successful children than single parents or cohabiting couples, though there are plenty of exceptions."  The most popular reader comment, with over 2000 likes, said "I notice that you didn't talk about the research that shows differences in gender in marriage happiness levels.    Marriage is generally GREAT for men, who report being far happier in marriage than being single.  Much research indicates the reverse is true for women.  Single women report being happier, in general, than married women are."  Most of the other leading comments were along the same lines.  Since the 1970s, the General Social Survey has asked whether "taken all together, how would you say things are these days."  41% of married women say that they are very happy, and 8% say they are "not too happy" (the rest chose "pretty happy"); among single (never married) women, 23% say they are very happy and 17% not too happy.  This is just one survey, but it's one that puts a lot of effort into selecting a representative sample and gets a high response rate, so it can be considered to be pretty definitive.  Of course, the difference in happiness between married and never-married women is not necessarily caused by marriage, but it's there.  But maybe the difference is smaller for women--married women are somewhat happier than single women, but married men are a lot happier?  The figure shows the averages for married and never-married men and women over the years (higher numbers mean happier).  There's a lot of sampling variation, so I also show the smoothed averages.  The pattern seems similar for men and women.The next figure shows the difference between married and never-married people among men and women:  Up until about 2000, the difference was a little bigger for men, but since then it's been about equal.  I looked to see if the gap varied by other characteristics--for example, education, race, political views.  To make a short story even shorter, I found nothing worth mentioning.  In the course of doing this analysis, I noticed that the GSS had a question on whether you thought that married people were generally happier than unmarried people.  45% agreed (or strongly agreed), 24% disagreed (or strongly disagreed), and 32% chose "neither agree nor disagree."  There were some group differences in average views on this question:  men were more likely to agree than women; whites more likely to agree than blacks or people of other races; conservatives more likely to agree than liberals; married and widowed people more likely to agree than never-married, with divorced people least likely to agree.  Despite what is sometimes said about "elites," there was no discernible difference by education, and people in higher status occupations were more likely to agree.  The question was asked only four times, most recently in 2012, but it seems like the gender difference was growing:  the means for men were 3.6 in 1988, 3.43 in 1994, 3.47 in 2002, and 3.32 in 2012; the means for women were 3.50, 3.26, 3.17, and 2.97 (higher means more agreement)--that is, the gender difference went from .10 to .35.  There were also signs that the gender difference varied among groups--for example, agreement was particularly low among black women (20% agreed and 48% disagreed).

 A recent piece in the New York Times says "In 1960, about 4 percent of Americans said they would be displeased if their child married someone from the other party. By 2020, that had grown to nearly four in 10. Indeed, only about 4 percent of all marriages today are between a Republican and a Democrat."  That is, they included a link to the source of the second piece of information, but not the first and the third.  But my standards of what's fit to link are lower, so I'll try to provide them.The first is from The Civic Culture, by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, but the third was new to me.  Ideally, you would have a survey that had separate interviews of both members of married couples, but there aren't many like that, so I looked for surveys that asked people about spouse's politics.  I couldn't find any that asked about their spouse's party identification or registration, but there was one from 2016 (just after the election) that asked people about how they and their spouse had voted.  There were also some earlier surveys that had parallel questions.  The results:            Same     Different      Ratio  1944   72%         4%                   181960   67%         5%                   13.41984   64%        6%                    10.72016   63%        4%                    15.8[2016  68%       10%]                   6.8Although I can't be sure, I'd guess that the 2016 survey was the source of the statement in the Times.  In any case, it makes it possible to compare things to the past.    In 1944, 1960, and 1984, almost all votes were for the Democratic or Republican candidate--the columns don't add to 100 because some people said that their spouse hadn't voted and others didn't know how they'd voted.  But in 2016, about 6% of the vote went to other candidates, and the figures in brackets include those votes.  If you don't count the 2016 "others," there's no clear pattern--the samples are only one or two thousand, so there's a good deal of sampling error.  If you count the "others," there was more intra-marriage disagreement in 2016 than in earlier elections.  But maybe at least some of those should be counted as intermediate (e. g., one for Trump, one a write-in) rather than disagreement?  I won't get into that--I'll just observe that the surveys don't provide evidence that married couples are more likely to vote the same way now as they were in the middle of the 20th century.  But what about the question about how you would feel if a child married someone from the other party, where there is evidence of change?  I'll consider that in a future post.  [Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research].   

I'm going to use this post to summarize my recent and prior visits to Michigan brewpubs. This is one instance when Google Timeline data is actually helpful, though this information only goes back to mid-year 2013 when I must have authorized the tracking software. I'm not listing breweries where I didn't drink. We went into Ludington's Jamesport once, but could not get a table for dinner in a timely fashion, and we quickly left Grand Armory in Grand Haven on the 2022 trip because it didn't offer outdoor seating. Given that Michigan has nearly 400 breweries, my personal list includes less than 5% of the total! I could move to Michigan and have a difficult time sampling all of them. 2024 (1 new; 20 total)Latitude 42°, KalamazooWe dined at Latitude 42° in April during a quick weekend trip north and quite enjoyed the food. I really liked an IPA on tap (Endless Summer), but it was not available in cans to take home. Another night we visited the Kalamazoo HopCat, which is not a brewery but is certainly beer-friendly. We've now visited HopCat locations in Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor, Holland, Kalamazoo, and Louisville (closed permanently). 2023 (1 new; 19 total)Griffin Claw, Rochester Hills near DetroitBrewery Vivant, Grand RapidsFounders, Grand RapidsWe dined at Griffin Claw and Brewery Vivant and the food was pretty good at both. We stopped at Founders to buy a crowler of one of my favorite beers generally unavailable in Kentucky (Red's Rye IPA) and I had a taster of Nitro Rubaeus. We had hoped to have a dessert, but they didn't offer it that night and so the smooth raspberry ale had to suffice. Incidentally, while we were in Ontario we visited Heritage Hops brewery in Stratford for a slice of chocolate cake (I paired it with a dark lager) before attending the play "Casey and Diana," and dined at Toboggan brewing in London on Father's Day. 2022 (4 new; 18 total)Odd Side Ales, Grand HavenUnruly Brewing, MuskegonRare Bird Brewing, Traverse CityCherry Republic Brewing Company and Public House, Glen ArborFounders, Grand RapidsWe dined at all of those places, though at Odd Side we had to order takeout from a nearby restaurant. They don't have food. 2021 (2 new; 14 total)Big Lake Brewing, HollandGuardian Brewing, SaugatuckBrewery Vivant, Grand RapidsWe also dined at all of these.2019 (2 new; 12 total)New Holland Brewing, HollandBig Lake Brewing, HollandClam Lake Beer Company, Cadillac (2)Filling Station, Traverse CityWorkshop Brewing, Traverse CityMiddleCoast Brewing, Traverse City (was called Monkey Fist at the time)We did not dine at Big Lake or MiddleCoast, but both have food (I think).2018 (2 new; 10 total)Workshop Brewing, Traverse CityClam Lake Beer Company, CadillacFilling Station, Traverse CityWe dined at these.2017I was on antibiotics that trip and did not visit any brewpubs and avoided alcohol. It was kind of sad. 2016 (2 new; 8 total)Saugatuck Brewing, SaugatuckFilling Station, Traverse City2015 (2 new ones, 6 total)Short's Brewing, BellaireRare Bird, Traverse CityWe dined at these.Older trips: (at least 4 visited)New Holland Brewing, HollandMackinaw Brewing, Traverse CityNorth Peak, Traverse CityJolly Pumpkin, Traverse CityWe did not dine at Jolly Pumpkin, but they have food -- and various other locations across the state.* It is possible my memory has failed me in recalling other brewpubs visited before 2015 as we have been going to Michigan as a family since the 1990s when my children were quite young. Then again, we didn't really take the kids to brewpubs when they were young -- maybe restaurants that happened to brew some of their own beer. I've also tried a good deal of Michigan beer in restaurants and taprooms, but I'm not going to list all of those here. I would put in a good word for the 7 Monks in Traverse. 
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 Conservatives typically report being happier than liberals do, but the size of the gap appears to change over time.    In 2015, I looked at data from the GSS  and found that the "happiness gap" became larger during the GW Bush presidency, but fell in the Obama presidency.  A few days ago, Ross Douthat had a column called "Can the Left be Happy," which said that "the left-right happiness gap is wider than before"--that is, the relative happiness of the left has declined in the last decade or so.   He made a plausible case but didn't offer any systematic data, so I'll take another look.The GSS asks people to rate their political ideology on a seven point scale, from very liberal to very conservative, which I collapsed into three groups:  extremely liberal or liberal; slightly liberal, moderate, or slightly conservative; conservative or extremely conservative.  The liberal and conservative groups are both about 15-20% of the sample.  The figure is hard to interpret, partly because of sampling error in individual years and partly because of the big drop among all groups in 2021 and 2022, so here's a figure showing the difference between the averages for liberals and conservatives (positive numbers mean conservatives report being happier than liberals do):The higher reference line is the average difference.  The gap was larger than average in 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008, and then fell in 2010 (liberals were actually happier than conservatives).  It's generally remained smaller than average since then.  Here's the corresponding figure for the moderate/conservative gap:A similar story:  the gap became a lot smaller in 2010, and has generally remained below average since then.  So it's not liberals who have become relatively unhappier in recent years, but conservatives.  Going back to the original figure, there was little or no happiness gap in the 1970s.  Conservatives pulled ahead in the 1980s, and the size of the gap seemed to be gradually increasing until 2008.  Then conservatives became less happy in 2010, and the gap has been smaller since then.  You could say that the shifts in the 21st century are just another example of increasing political polarization:  liberals are relatively happy when a Democrat is in office, and conservatives are relatively happy when a Republican is.  But I don't think that fits the pattern very well.  Although there were signs of growing polarization under Bush, they were pretty small--you didn't get a big increase until the Obama years.  And although conservatives became relatively happier in 2018, the change was not that big, and the gap remained smaller than it had been under Bush. But considering the whole period suggests that there may be a connection to the general political and social climate.  In the 1970s, the tide seemed to be running to the left, but with the tax revolt of the late 1970s and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, things seemed to stabilize and maybe even reverse.  Before the 2008 election, conservatives could feel pretty good--Republicans had won five of the last seven presidential elections, and no Democrat had received a majority of the popular vote since Jimmy Carter got 50.1% in 1976.  Republicans had also gained parity in Congress, and the courts had moved to the right.  Then Obama was elected with a lot of popular enthusiasm, a solid Congressional majority, and an economic crisis that provided a rationale for vigorous government action.  Prominent conservatives reacted to the threat by a strategy of scorched-earth opposition--e. g. they denounced Obamacare not just as ineffective and expensive, but as the end of the American way of life.  Since then, conservatives have felt like they are on the defensive, even when Trump was president--fighting against the deep state, the media, Big Tech, etc.  So my idea is that although ratings of happiness are primarily affected by individual factors, there is some spillover from feelings about the general direction of society.