Juan Convers

Yesterday evening I was listening a really cool Freakonomics podcast episode titled How needs handwriting . Stephen Dubner discussed the pros and cons of handwriting, its origins and the emphasis is still given in the high school system. Quite interesting.

I started to think that I use hand writing at work to draw schemas about the different pieces of a project or task that I need to accomplish, but it definitely has been a while since the last time I wrote a proper hand written letter.

I'm wanted to check if there was data about postal volume, because I guess the decline in handwriting has an impact on these numbers. I found two interesting sources:

• [UK Postal Museum](http://www.postalheritage.org.uk/explore/history/statistics/)
• [US Postal Services](https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-facts/decade-of-facts-and-figures.htm)

Both sites show a decline in the number of total mail send. The decline is particularly dramatic after 2005:

Last night I was walking around the neighbourhood, while I was listening a very interesting podcast from NPR, explaining how and when the CEOs compensation packages exploded. You can get it here. What they discussed in a nutshell was that the enterprises tried to match the compensation of their CEOs with the performance (fair enough) using Stock Options, but the companies didn't realize what was the exact value of those offers.

The economic public institute published an article last year about how the CEOs make [300 times the salary of an average worker](http://jco.im/300-times).

It is hard to assess what are the most popular programming languages because there are multiple ways to measure them but none of the are perfect (ie. Repositories, lines of code, occurrences in job offers, etc). For example if work with embedded systems C is very popular, but if you work on the web the history is very different.

One interesting measurement of popularity of a language are the questions related to the language. Stack Overflow features questions and answers on a wide range of programming languages and compiles a list of the most popular tags with total, today and this week breakdown.

This data is a nice proxy on how popular are the different programming languages.

Last sunday it was really warm here in Berlin. I was able to get on my bike and do a nice ride to the north part of the city. Nevertheless I remembered some data I read back in January about how the world is really warming up:

This winter has been really mild in Berlin.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics published the unemployment figures for the month of January and the rate is low: 4.9%. It's one of the lowest unemployment rate since the whole financial crisis of 2008. The rate is half of what it was in the peak of October 2009:

Even if those are very good news for the American people, on the other hand the increase on the wages is still sluggish. In the last quarter of 2015 the rate was 1.9%. It was around 3% before the crisis hit hard.

If I were American I would ask those questions to the presidential candidates.

Next page