A book worth thinking and reading

Here's Tyler Cowen's review;

When doing the statistics, one key issue is how to measure violence. Pinker often favors “per capita” measures, but I am not so sure. I might prefer a weighted average of per capita and “absolute quantity of violence” measures. Killing six million Jews in the Holocaust is not, in my view, “half as violent” if global population is twice as high. Once you toss in the absolute measures with the per capita measures, the long-term trends are not nearly as favorable as Pinker suggests.

Chart of the Day- STDs in US

The Economic Geography of a Data Centre Location

Why did Facebook locate its new data centre in central Oregon? Babbage tries to explain.

The reason, the centre's boss Ken Patchett explains, is the weather. At first blush, this seems odd. Temperatures in Prineville routinely drop to -5°C (22°F) in the winter and climb to 32°C (90°F) in the summer. And the desert clime means that drops of 28°C (50°F) between day and night are not unheard of around this time of year. That ought to make keeping the servers at a steady 20–25°C (68–77°F) and 40–55% relative humidity an arduous task.

In fact, the Prineville plant is a leading exponent of a new style of data-centre management. It does away with expensive air-conditioning "chillers". Instead, air is brought in from outside. For this approach to work, however, the desert is key. For much of the year outside air is actually cool enough to keep the servers from overheating. At the lowest temperatures, just the gentlest of breezes needs to be brought inside at all. And, this being the desert, nights are chilly irrespective of the season, so even in the summer additional cooling is only needed during the hottest times of day.

Assorted websites

Please Rob Me [don't post on Facebook that your houses are empty for the weeken]

Graphy Your Inbox

Happy Marriage fact of the Day

a marriage is worth almost £80,000 ($110,000) a year; this reflects partly the fact that marriage makes people happy, but also the fact that we need lots of money to increase our well-being by much.

-Economics in Desperate Housewives

Young Americans and Britons take the lead

in cocaine-use!

Pornography Fact of the Day

subscriptions to online pornography sites are “more prevalent in states where surveys indicate conservative positions on religion, gender roles, and sexuality.”

via Numbers Guy

Here's the Paper;
Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?
Benjamin Edelman

The fifth column shows that subscriptions are more prevalent in regions with higher measures of social capital. Following the Social Capital Index developed in Putnam (2000), I obtain DDB Life Style Survey data from 1991 to 1998 on
consumers in 340 metropolitan areas, and I form a social capital index based on
prevalence of people donating blood, engaging in volunteer activities, or participating in community projects. In a region where 1 percent more people participate in these activities, subscriptions to the adult entertainment service are 0.09 percent more widespread.

The Market for Medical Tourism

New figures from Deloitte LLP, an international consulting firm, show how popular the practice has become with an estimated 750,000 Americans seeking medical care abroad in 2007.

Projections indicate this number could be as high as six million by 2010.

Stacy Keibler Correction Coefficient

Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters

One of the best Google Talks- Bill Tancer is somebody to look out for.

Assorted Olympics

China 2008 olympic medal tally by population

Olympics at Sports-Reference.com

The Glory of Just Showing Up

Poverty Measurement

a sensible way to measure poverty?

Incredible America

The census calculates that by 2042, Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will together outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Four years ago, officials had projected the shift would come in 2050.

The main reason for the accelerating change is significantly higher birthrates among immigrants. Another factor is the influx of foreigners, rising from about 1.3 million annually today to more than 2 million a year by midcentury, according to projections based on current immigration policies.

“No other country has experienced such rapid racial and ethnic change,” said Mark Mather, a demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, a research organization in Washington.

-In a Generation, Minorities May Be the U.S. Majority

Explainer of the Day

Gasoline prices

Assorted

A Tale of Two Charts

More Reasons Not To Take The Candidates' Budget Proposals Too Seriously

Make Diplomacy, Not War

Anne-Marie Slaughter on China;

One of the best books I read on China was Susan Shirk’s “Fragile Superpower,” which argues that for all its energy and emerging power, China is fragile precisely because its political system is just one layer deep. If the Communist Party were to lose power, there is no back-up in place — only the specter of in-fighting fragmentation, chaos, and even civil war. Which is precisely why the government is so worried to stamp out any spark that could potentially ignite wider unrest.

The fragility extends to the economy. If ordinary Chinese suddenly cannot get jobs, or can’t get jobs that will allow them to put food on the table or gas in their motorbikes in an era of rising food and energy prices, there are no years of experience with the business cycle of expansion and recession to cushion the shock of unemployment and belt-tightening. Our current development has happened over decades, fairly steadily since the Depression, but with plenty of bumps along the way. Those psychological layers, just like the layers of our infrastructure, create resilience and strength.

These Olympics, Americans will compete as hard as we possibly can for the gold. Those of our athletes who lose, however, will know that they or their successors will have the chance to compete again; that the nation’s honor does not rest once and for all on their shoulders. America has hosted the Olympics before and will again.

For China, the veneer is much thinner and the stakes are much higher. Beijing has built fantastic Olympic buildings and will put on a dazzling show to tell all the world that it has resumed its rightful place on the global stage. But for all China’s accomplishments, and they are accomplishments, the architecture, infrastructure, economy and even the political system are only one layer deep.

Turkey Fact of the Day

Turkey's gender gap in years of schooling (of women relative to men) has also been consistently lower than other Muslim countries.

via Iyigun Blog

Not Related;
Turkey Problem

Cool link of the Day

Britain from Above

Stolen Money Fact of the Day

According to one estimate, corrupt money flowing abroad from developing countries is now $40 billion per year which amounts to 40% of annual official development assistance funds.

-Putting the focus on Stolen Assets

US Fact of the Day

How Are We Doing?

Shipping Inflation

The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in the decade, according to a recent study of transportation costs.

Shipping Costs Start to Crimp Globalization

Suicide Bombing Fact of the Day

• More than 85 percent of female suicide terrorists since 1981 committed their attacks on behalf of secular organizations; many grew up in Christian and Hindu families. Further, Islamist groups commonly discourage and only grudgingly accept female suicide attackers. At the start of the second intifada in 2000, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, claimed: “A woman martyr is problematic for Muslim society. A man who recruits a woman is breaking Islamic law.” Hamas actually rejected Darin Abu Eisheh, the second Palestinian female attacker, who carried out her 2002 bombing on behalf of the secular Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

• For one, 95 percent of female suicide attacks occurred within the context of a military campaign against foreign occupying forces, suggesting that, at a macro level, the main strategic logic is to create or maintain territorial sovereignty for their ethnic group

• All secular organizations that employ suicide bombings have used female attackers early and often. For instance, 76 percent of attackers from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey have been women, as have 66 percent of those from Chechen separatist groups, 45 percent of the Syrian Socialist National Party’s and a quarter of those from the Tamil Tigers.

-Behind the Woman Behind the Bomb

Related;
A Sociobiological View of Palestinian Suicide Bombers;

Suicide bombings have been one of the major hurdles to the Israeli-Palestinian peace and over the past four years, acts of terrorism have killed 958 Israelis and maimed thousands of others. In America, the typical explanations for this behavior center around three themes: poverty, lack of education and mental illness. The limited amount of research that exists on suicide bombers, however, suggests that these assumptions are wrong. It appears that suicide terrorists have no appreciable mental disorders and demographic data shows that they tend to be no less educated and no poorer than the surrounding population. Given the gravity of the situation and the inaccuracy of current explanations, I propose that alternative methods be used to assess the behavior of Palestinian suicide terrorists. With this paper, I combine sociobiology (a.k.a. evolutionary psychology), memetics and game theory to help explain the emergence of Palestinian suicide terrorism and to analyze the motives of the individual bombers. Bringing together research from these different fields, it becomes clear that suicide bombers act as a result of a confluence of generally adaptive psychological traits that are brought together in a maladaptive way by the peculiarities of the Palestinian situation. Suicide bombers are motivated by religious factors, particularly the notions of martyrdom and jihad, and other social factors including groupishness, the obedience to authority, xenophobia, reciprocity, the inclusive fitness of relatives and the protection of territory. Furthermore, the frequency and motives of male and female suicide bombers seems to be in keeping with their evolved sex strategies and gender roles. While these adaptations may have been beneficial in the ancestral environment, I show that combined today under the auspices of violent terrorist organizations has led to the emergence of suicide bombers.