Actress, singer and Philippines Ambassador Against Hunger KC Concepcion travels to the island of Mindanao for a look at one of her country’s most intriguing regions. The only island in the Philippines to host a large Muslim population, Mindinao also suffers from high levels of child malnutrition. KC’s journey takes her from a school where local children are celebrating the Islamic New Year to a woman’s cooperative and health centre where food is provided to those in need.
EDIT: added description from website.
rePost::Catch Me. . .I’m in Notting Hell (Now with more hell!) | JessicarulestheUniverse
6. Your brand-new boyfriend Gerald Anderson is late to your parents’ anniversary party because he has to attend an official function with Father President. You call and text but he doesn’t reply pronto, being preoccupied with official duties. What will you do?
a. Shrug if off. If I wanted someone who would spend all his time with me, I’d date the unemployed.
b. Ano ang magagawa ko, anak siya ng presidente samantalang ako’y isang hamak na mortal huhuhu hindi ako karapat-dapat na pansinin ng katulad niya hikbi.
c. First I will force him to choose between me and his family and country. Then I shall leverage this incident into a perpetual guilt trip and use it to manipulate him throughout our relationship!
d. Announce on facebook and twitter that I am committing suicide. Then slash my wrists and take an overdose of sleeping pills (2) but leave the door unlocked and make sure someone will check on me. Then take pictures of him weeping and post them on facebook and twitter.
e. Other (Explain.)
via Catch Me. . .I’m in Notting Hell (Now with more hell!) | JessicarulestheUniverse.
Quote :: :: Pitchfork: Articles: You Were There: The Complete LCD Soundsystem
“I’ve put my life into it,” Murphy told The Wire in 2005. “I’m fully aware that it’s my life. I don’t have parents– they’re gone. I don’t get another life. I’m 34 years old and this is it. My entire youth is gone and dedicated to this, so I care enormously. I meet lots of people who don’t realize that this is their only life.”
via Pitchfork: Articles: You Were There: The Complete LCD Soundsystem.
Better Press Corp Please :: 'Gullible' journalist falls for satirical blog post – Technology – GMA News Online – Latest Philippine News
‘Gullible’ journalist falls for satirical blog post
TJ DIMACALI, GMA News
03/26/2011 | 06:12 PM
Prominent Filipino journalist Carmen Navarro Pedrosa made a journalistic faux pas on Saturday when she warned Filipino readers not to be gullible — and then proceeded to unwittingly cite fake statistics from a satirical blog.
In her From A Distance column in the March 26 issue of The Philippine Star, Pedrosa expressed concern over the purported findings of a Harvard University study, which claimed that Filipinos are “the most gullible people in the world.”
‘A serious allegation’
“This is a serious allegation we should not ignore… we better take it seriously,” she said.
The problem is that the supposed Harvard study — including its “content analyses of over 500,000 historical documents from 300 different societies” by the “Harvard Institute of Political Progression (HIS-PP)”— is entirely fictitious, the work of satirical blog MosquitoPress.net.
Apparently, the satirical nature of the post was lost on Pedrosa, who concluded her writeup by saying, “We are gullible because we are not able or do not question information. We prefer to believe what other persons tell us.”
via ‘Gullible’ journalist falls for satirical blog post – Technology – GMA News Online – Latest Philippine News.
::Entrenpreneurship as a Silver Bullet ::10tonfunk LITE – Notes from Ha-Joon Chang’s Lecture at NYU on “23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism”
I just love it when I find something that expresses what I’ve long believed to be true but cannot express in a way that satisfies the frustrated essayist/writer in me.
The new spiel that politicians and social change advocates of the Philippines profess to advocate is entrepreneurship. Bullshit. There is a reason that Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley. There is a reason that no matter what a lot of countries do the game is still played by the valley’s rules. The valley is structured to allow the next yahoo, google, youtube and, facebook.
If you are professing to be more than a snake’s oil salesmen then what are you doing to create the structure that would allow entrepreneurship to result into amazing wealth. Think of the Henry Sy’s , the Lucio Tan’s, the Andrew Tan’s. How do we make things just a little bit easier for the next batch of tycoons? If all you can say is entrepreneurship and nothing else, please shut up and don’t waste our times.
Thing 15: “People in poor countries are more entrepreneurial than people in rich countries”
George W. Bush: “The problem with the French is they don’t have a word for entrepreneurship.” Lot of people like to say you need entrepreneurs to make a rich country, the problem with poor countries is the lack of entrepreneurs.
In fact, developing countries teem with micro-entrepreneurs selling things you didn’t know could be bought and sold. Like professional line queuers who get in line early and sell the place. If full of entrepreneurs, why are these countries poor? Rich countries have many people doing specialized jobs for large companies. In rich countries 1/8 people is self employed. The rate is 2-3x that in poor countries. Ratio of rich to poor is 4:2. Bangladesh to US is 10:1 . Norway to Benin is 13:1.
The reason this doesn’t result in wealth is entrepreneurship is rarely an individual event now, if it ever was. You need social infrastructure; corporate, legal and financial systems. This is why microfinance has had such little result. Poor country’s with high self employment numbers prove this — you need structure.
For example: a Croatian microfinance group, helped everyone buy cows. As a result the milk market (which is based on perishable goods) flooded and collapsed, and everyone ended up in more debt. In Denmark, during last century, they bought cows, but had cooperative creameries, made cheese for export, and fed whey to pigs which were then slaughtered in collective slaughterhouse. Individual farmers couldn’t set up creamieres or slaughterhouses themselves.
95% of economics is common sense made deliberately complicated . Priests used to do in Latin, economists do it with numbers. All professions build jargon to keep people away, but it’s more advanced in economics. Why treat economists with kid gloves when we have strong opinions on everything else? … “I’m like the magicians that show you how tricks are done on TV.” There are certainly some secondary things only trained economists can and should do. However we’re often lacking facts that would help us make decisions — the purpose of the book is to help educate people about economics and encourage them to be “active economic citizens.”
via 10tonfunk LITE – Notes from Ha-Joon Chang’s Lecture at NYU on “23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism”.
Science :: 100-year floods – Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
I wonder what type of flood the floods Ondoy brought were? I’m guessing probably a toss up between 50 and 100 year floods.
100-year floods
By Andrew Gelman on March 25, 2011 9:37 AM | 5 Comments
According to the National Weather Service:
What is a 100 year flood? A 100 year flood is an event that statistically has a 1% chance of occurring in any given year. A 500 year flood has a .2% chance of occurring and a 1000 year flood has a .1% chance of occurring.
The accompanying map shows a part of Tennessee that in May 2010 had 1000-year levels of flooding.
At first, it seems hard to believe that a 1000-year flood would have just happened to occur last year. But then, this is just a 1000-year flood for that particular place. I don’t really have a sense of the statistics of these events. How many 100-year, 500-year, and 1000-year flood events have been recorded by the Weather Service, and when have they occurred?
via 100-year floods – Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
Inspiring short film on the Panyee Football Club?
The Lottery Mentality – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com
The Lottery Mentality
Updated March 22, 2011, 05:24 PM
Chrystia Freeland is the global editor-at-large at Thomson Reuters.
Americans actually live in Russia, although they think they live in Sweden. And they would like to live on a kibbutz. This isn’t the set-up for some sort of politically incorrect Catskills stand-up joke circa 1960. It is the takeaway from a remarkable study by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely on how Americans think about income inequality.
Americans are mistaken about income inequality because of national self-confidence and the lottery effect.
The right likes to argue that income inequality as an issue doesn’t win elections because Americans don’t begrudge the rich so much as they want to join them. The Norton and Ariely study suggests otherwise. Given a choice, the authors find, Americans would prefer to live in a society more equal than even highly egalitarian Sweden.
Another popular view is that income inequality isn’t experienced as acutely by most Americans as the numbers suggest because of how much can be “consumed” by the lower rungs of the nation’s socioeconomic ladder. No less a figure than Alan Greenspan, the maestro himself, once made this case at the Federal Reserve’s annual Jackson Hole conference, presenting data on the consumption of dishwashers, microwaves and clothes dryers showing that if measured by the possession of these goods – as opposed to the huge and growing income divide — inequality was decreasing.
That interpretation is not without merit. But it turned out that allowing Americans to prosper by using their homes as A.T.M.’s and maxing out on their credit cards was maybe not such a great idea.
Personally, I lean toward two other theories. Americans are mistaken about income inequality because of national self-confidence and the lottery effect.
By national self-confidence, I mean the widespread conviction that the American way is probably right because all those other ways don’t seem to work out so well. This is a wonderful national quality and one of the reasons America has such resilience. But confidence in the American way can make it hard for the country as a whole to recognize when things aren’t working.
Take, for instance, the health care debate, when a politically effective criticism of what has come to be known as Obamacare was to argue that it would destroy the “best” health care system in the world. Mary Meeker, a Silicon Valley guru of impeccably capitalist and American credentials debunked that idea in her recent USA, Inc. presentation, in which she pointed out that “U.S.A. per capita health care spending is 3x OECD average, yet the average life expectancy and a variety of health indicators in the U.S. fall below average. But if you spend way more than everyone else, shouldn’t your results (a.k.a. performance) be better than everyone else’s, or at least near the top?”
Aside from faith in American national excellence, the other main reason Americans seem so unperturbed by the widening chasm between the rich and everyone else is what I like to call the lottery effect. Buying lottery tickets is clearly an irrational act — the odds are hugely stacked against us. But many millions of us do, because we see the powerful evidence that an ordinary person, someone just like us whose only qualifying act was to buy a ticket, wins our favorite lottery every week.
For many Americans, the nation’s rowdy form of capitalism is a lottery that has similarly bestowed fabulous rewards on the Everyman. The current leading exemplar of self-made billions is Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and he may soon be outstripped by the even more instant cyber-star Andrew Mason, the founder of Groupon.
But the problem with lotteries is that there are only a few winners. That is the story the numbers tell us about American capitalism today — and unless that underlying reality changes, at some point all those folks who think they already live in Sweden will realize they live in a winner-take-all society, and that most of us aren’t winning.
via The Lottery Mentality – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com.
Learned Today ::Anti Link Rot ::The (Nature of) Shock Doctrine – NYTimes.com
When someone claims causality for one thing it might be useful to look at something closely related to understand if they move the same way to make it clear which among the possible choices would explain it.
March 23, 2011, 10:21 AM
The (Nature of) Shock Doctrine
Just a thought on market movements: you often see news stories confidently asserting that factor X was responsible for any given market movement. Serious observers rightly make fun of such stories; after all, how do they know? And it goes beyond funny to downright harmful when the stories assert supposed facts that actually serve some policy agenda. Lately we’ve seen that with regard to interest rates: again and again, upticks in US interest rates are asserted to be the result of debt fears, as evidence that the bond vigilantes have arrived.
But how can you place an interpretation on market movements? What’s the nature of the shock? One way to answer this question would be to ask the traders — although my sense is that really good traders have intuitions that generally go beyond their ability to articulate reasons. Another approach, however, is to look at more than one asset price; if you have a story about what’s driving one price, that story should make sense for the other, too.
Many years ago, when the Fed still claimed to pay attention to targets for monetary aggregates, there was an observable pattern: whenever the money supply came in higher than expected, interest rates rose. But there were two interpretations. Some people said that rates went up because markets believed rising money supplies heralded future inflation; others, that rates rose because people expected the Fed to tighten to get the money supply back on target.
Jeff Frankel cut through this debate by pointing out that we could look at what happened to the exchange rate. In fact, high money numbers were associated with a rise, not a fall, in the dollar — and this meant that fears of Fed tightening, not fears of inflation, were the real story.
via The (Nature of) Shock Doctrine – NYTimes.com.
rePost :: Market Manila – Pinoy “ATM” :) – General
Kikita kaya ng malaki sa maynila ito (Will this make a killing in Manila )?
Read Market Manila’s take on the possible economics of these devices. This way of thinking is promising.
Turns out the ATMs were an abbreviation for “Automatic Tubig Machine” or Automatic Water Machines! I took these photos a year ago, but forgot to post them. For one peso (2.4 U.S. cents) put into the “ATM”, you get 250ml of chilled purified water straight into either your recyclable container, or on the dark side, a cheap plastic bag that inevitably ends up polluting the planet. I wonder who dreamt that up?! And whoever did, along with many other copycats, are making a KILLING with them.
via Market Manila – Pinoy “ATM” 🙂 – General.