Link Banana

The Economist provides a handy charts with the odd on where President Obama will visit first. Britain’s way ahead, if you’re too lazy to click.

I’m increasingly leery of news stories proclaiming that academics have proven or demonstrated something or other. That said, some Dutch researchers have experimental evidence showing that signals of low-level crime make people more likely to litter or steal.

(via Ideas)

An accurate predictor of the winner of the last seven presidential elections: Halloween mask sales.

In case you had doubts about the United State being one of the least equal “developed” countries, The Economist has a simple chart for you.

A very interesting daily chart from The Economist. The basic analysis:

Those [children of international parents] craving an unhealthy diet should make for America, where more than half of the expat parents said that their children had eaten more junk food since relocating. Keen gamers should consider China and Canada, whereas telly addicts should nag their parents to move to the United Arab Emirates or India.

If, like me, you had no idea what melamine is or why it was such a bad thing to find in Chinese milk, I suggest this Tech.view column (for that, and a whole lot more):

Melamine is used to make durable work-surfaces for kitchen cabinets and bathroom furniture, and is formed into heat-resistant jugs, bowls, dinnerware, and other household items. To be accurate, such products are made not from melamine, but from melamine resin—a thermosetting plastic produced by combining melamine with formaldehyde.

… Melamine itself is a different matter. In low doses, it is non-toxic; its so-called LD50 (median lethal dose) is on a par with table salt. But should it be combined with a closely related chemical called cyanuric acid, the resulting compound (melamine cyanurate) can cause fatal kidney disease. Melamine cyanurate is widely used as a fire retardant.

In a somewhat odd and thoroughly sweeping summary of comebacks — in a variety of fields — throughout history, The Economist says that Lance Armstrong should be careful not to end up like… Enron’s Ken Lay?

But Mr Armstrong must hope not to follow the example of a fellow American who reassumed the top job. Ken Lay retook the chief executive’s role at Enron in August 2001 after a break of six months and shortly before the firm made the biggest bankruptcy filing in American history.

UPDATE (20 minutes later): Perhaps the logic behind the awkward comparison is this: if Armstrong, like Lay, was crooked before the break, it’s possible that upon returning (still crooked) he’ll be caught.

While the world, and I, was paying attention to the situation in Harare, I predicted that Mugabe would effectively wait out the world’s short attention span and then keep power in the mess that remains of his country. He’s certainly outlasted the world’s attention span, but I would love to be wrong and see this power-sharing deal work out.

I wasn’t quite sure how to read a recent story in The Economist about demonstrations in Kashmir. Pankaj Mishra says that its clear evidence that if the Indian government doesn’t change its ways, it risks creating a new generation of motivated international terrorists.

A new generation of politicized Kashmiris has now risen; the world is again likely to ignore them — until some of them turn into terrorists with Qaeda links. It is up to the Indian government to reckon honestly with Kashmiri aspirations for a life without constant fear and humiliation. Some first steps are obvious: to severely cut the numbers of troops in Kashmir; to lift the economic blockade on the Kashmir Valley; and to allow Kashmiris to trade freely across the line of control with Pakistan.

When considering the under-noticed anniversary of Burma’s 1988 uprising, The Economist’s Asia.view column hits a sensible point I’d never considered:

No, the reason the revolution failed was simple: the army was prepared to kill as many people as it took to thwart it.

So long as a state apparatus is strong and remains cohesive, it’s hard to imagine how any citizen uprising can end authoritarianism.

I’ve documented before The Economist’s penchant for unusual economic indicators. The classic example, the Big Mac index — in which the price of the sandwich serves as a proxy for purchasing power parity (PPP), has been unveiled for 2008.

Perhaps more novelly, the magazine’s Africa correspondent, Jonathan Ledgard, offers the intriguing possibilty that sales of Coca-Cola are a signal of how peaceful and prosperous a given area of the continent is. (via Passport)

I’ve often heard people say that America’s maternity benefits are bad, but this chart really drives it home. Worst in the OECD isn’t the worst in the world, but it’s still a touch embarrassing.

An interesting measure of poverty: the percentage of total household spending that goes to food, drink, and and fuel.

For similar reasons as Equatorial Guinea, The Economist’s Asia.view column asks “why we don’t hear more about Bangladesh?”

According to Odhikar, a Bangladeshi human-rights group, 68 people died in extrajudicial killings (often called “crossfire”) in the first half of this year. Torture is endemic. The government also quietly adopted a new counter-terrorism ordinance last month, without debate. Human Rights Watch, a research and lobbying group, says it violates fundamental freedoms.

In an interesting but odd graph, The Economist shows that though America requires the most albums sold for an artist to “go platinum,” Norway, Britain, and Australia require more sales per capita.

Foreign Policy’s annual figures about the risk of states disintegrating is out. I must say I’m surprised by the rather good scores of Chile and Mauritius.

(via The Economist)

A sad fact I’d not heard before:

So it is across much of south and east Ethiopia. In the highlands the rain was erratic; in the lowlands it fell not at all. The result is that an extra 4.5m of Ethiopia’s 80m people need emergency food, on top of the 5m or so who already get it, according to the UN’s World Food Programme.

The government says a recovery is possible if the rains expected later in the year are good. Foreign aid specialists say that the food shortages are “going in the direction of high mortality”. The government is supposed to have 450,000 tonnes in a grain stockpile, with 100,000 tonnes in reserve to keep prices from rising too much. But it has only 65,000 tonnes left.

The Economist’s Europe.view column considers the recently reinfused question of whether Lech Walesa, leader of the Solidarity movement that brought an end to Communism in Poland, had ever collaborated with the Communist government.

Some believe that Mr Walesa’s seemingly erratic behaviour and poor choice of advisers as president from 1990-95 was the result of blackmail (he strongly denies this too). That goes straight to the most divisive question in modern Polish politics.

For a large chunk of Polish opinion, the “PRL”, as the Polish People’s Republic is known, was fundamentally illegitimate. Everything that happened—including much so-called “dissident” activity—was a sham and a fraud, orchestrated by Polish or Soviet secret police. Others see the PRL as a pragmatic response to Poland’s impossible position after 1945. Surely it was better to live as best as one could than to die senselessly in the forests or rot in jail.

This idea, like all great ones, seems like something a seven-year-old dreamed up:

Dietrich Stein, of the Ruhr-University of Bochum, wants to free up the roads by diverting the Ruhr’s freight underground. If his plan succeeds, the road network at the surface will be duplicated by a system of tubes below, inhabited by small vehicles that steer themselves automatically from factories to shops or even to individual homes.

In an excellent overview of suburbs in the United States, The Economist recently pointed to an interesting fact: while suburbs are increasingly diverse, urban areas are becoming whiter.

According to William Frey, a demographer, the white population of big-city suburbs grew by 7% between 2000 and 2006. In the same period the suburban Asian population grew by 16%, the black population by 24% and the Hispanic population by an astonishing 60%. Many immigrants to America now move directly to the suburbs without passing through established urban ghettos. Having conquered suburbia, ethnic-minority groups are now swiftly infiltrating the more distant “exurbs”.

As the suburbs become more mixed, some inner-city areas are turning less so. Los Angeles, which markets itself as the city “where the world comes together”, and New York (“the world’s second home”) both added whites and lost blacks between 2000 and 2006. So many blacks moved out of Los Angeles that, were the exodus to continue unabated, they would disappear from the city around 2050. Manhattan and San Francisco lost Hispanics as well as blacks, which is remarkable given that group’s speedy growth in the country as a whole. Meanwhile, the world came together on their fringes.