Category: rePosts

Not having the best day (although fixing bugs left and right), when people tell me the world is going to the dumps I internally sigh. Save for the Global Warming thing and the Escalation of Chinese and American tension the world is doing fine.

Not only was the last decade the best of my life, it was best for the world:
A lot has changed in the past six years. The economies of the developing world have expanded 50 percent in real terms, despite the Great Recession. Moreover, growth has been particularly high in countries with large numbers of poor people. India and China, of course, but also Bangladesh, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Uganda, Mozambique and Uzbekistan – nine countries that were collectively home to nearly two-thirds of the world’s poor in 2005 – are all experiencing phenomenal economic advances. ..

We updated the World Bank’s official $1.25-a-day figures to reveal how the global poverty landscape has changed. … We estimate that between 2005 and 2010, nearly half a billion people escaped extreme hardship, as the total number of the world’s poor fell to 878 million people. Never before in history have so many people been lifted out of poverty in such a short period. …. The emerging markets of Asia are recording the greatest successes; the two regional giants, China and India, are likely to account for three-quarters of the global reduction between 2005 and 2015. … With few exceptions, however, those who care about global development have been slow to catch on to this story. We hear far more about the 64 million people held back in poverty because of the Great Recession than we do about the hundreds of millions who escaped impoverishment over the past six years. (more)

The greatest surprise, however, is the one taking place in Sub-Saharan Africa. Between 1980 and 2005, the region’s poverty rate had consistently hovered above 50 percent. Given the continent’s high population growth, its number of poor rose steadily. The current period is different. For the first time, Sub-Saharan Africa’s poverty rate has fallen below 50 percent. The total number of poor people in the region is falling too.

Doesn’t sound much like stagnation to me.

via Overcoming Bias : Best Decade Ever.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/01/best-decade-ever.html

One virtually unknown episode in the last century illustrates how the Philippines became a light in a very dark time. In 2008 German-born author Frank Ephraim published Escape to Manila: From Nazi Tyranny to Japanese Terror, an account of the Jewish refugee experience in World War II. In 1939 Ephraim was one of 1,200 Jews who fled the Nazi genocide in Europe and took sanctuary in the Philippines.
Thanks to the Steven Spielberg movie (and the 1982 Thomas Keneally book it was based on) many of us know that in WWII a German businessman named Oskar Schindler saved over 1,200 Jews from the concentration camps and certain death. What we do not know is that in the late 1930s in Manila, while they were playing poker and smoking cigars, seven men decided to rescue 1,200 Jews from the Nazis.
Documentary filmmaker Russ Hodge, 3 Roads Communications and Frieder Films are in Manila to shoot Rescue in the Philippines, the story of how President Manuel L. Quezon, the US High Commissioner Paul McNutt, Colonel (and future president) Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the Frieders, four Jewish businessmen from Ohio who had a cigar business in Manila, overcame the huge bureaucratic and logistical challenges of saving people from the Holocaust.
They did it because it was the right thing to do.
via Quezon’s list: How the Philippines gave sanctuary to Jews fleeing the Holocaust – EMOTIONAL WEATHER REPORT By Jessica Zafra – The Philippine Star » Lifestyle Features » Sunday Life.

Bravo !!

THROUGH the National Institutes of Health, American taxpayers have long supported research directed at understanding and treating human disease. Since 2009, the results of that research have been available free of charge on the National Library of Medicine’s Web site, allowing the public patients and physicians, students and teachers to read about the discoveries their tax dollars paid for.But a bill introduced in the House of Representatives last month threatens to cripple this site. The Research Works Act would forbid the N.I.H. to require, as it now does, that its grantees provide copies of the papers they publish in peer-reviewed journals to the library. If the bill passes, to read the results of federally funded research, most Americans would have to buy access to individual articles at a cost of $15 or $30 apiece. In other words, taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.This is the latest salvo in a continuing battle between the publishers of biomedical research journals like Cell, Science and The New England Journal of Medicine, which are seeking to protect a valuable franchise, and researchers, librarians and patient advocacy groups seeking to provide open access to publicly funded research.
via Research Bought, Then Paid For – NYTimes.com.

Uncloaking a Slumlord Conspiracy with Social Network Analysis
“Sunlight is the best disinfectant” – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
A client of ours — a small, not-for-profit, economic justice organization [EJO] — used social network analysis [SNA] to assist their city attorney in convicting a group of “slumlords” of various housing violations that the real estate investors had been side-stepping for years. The housing violations, in multiple buildings, included:
raw sewage leaks
multiple tenant children with high lead levels
eviction of complaining tenants
utility liens of six figures
The EJO had been working with local tenants in run-down properties and soon started to notice some patterns. The EJO began to collect public data on the properties with the most violations. As the collected data grew in size, the EJO examined various ways they could visualize the data making it clear and understandable to all concerned. They tried various mind-mapping and organization-charting software but to no avail — the complex ties they were discovering just made the diagrams hopelessly unreadable. They turned to social network analysis [SNA] to make sense of the complex interconnectivity.
The data I will present below is not the actual data from the criminal case. However, it does accurately reflect the social network analysis they performed. The names and genders of the individuals, as well as the names of real estate holdings [LLC] and other businesses have all been masked. This case will be presented in the sequence the EJO followed, first they looked at the real estate holdings, then the owners of the holdings, and then their connections, which led to other connections, and more people and entities.
via Revealing Economic Terrorists: a Slumlord Conspiracy.