The Institute for Economics and Peace’s annual Global Peace Index (GPI) reported an increase in world peace after two consecutive years of decline. The change was driven by slight reductions worldwide in terrorist acts, military expenditure as a percentage of GDP, military sophistication, and aggregate number of heavy weapons per capita. […]
The PPI concluded that North America and Western Europe are the most positively peaceful regions, and that full democracies have the highest average levels of peace both on the PPI and the GPI. This finding contributes to the ongoing debate about the efficacy of hybrid regimes versus democracies, suggesting that liberal democracies in fact produce more peaceful societies. […]
Sub-Saharan Africa was reported as the least positively peaceful region, followed by the Middle East and North Africa. […]
The most peaceful countries, Iceland, Denmark, and New Zealand, shared the characteristics of harmonious society, very little internal and external conflict, and especially, low military spending. With its high military spending and involvement in external conflicts, the U.S. slipped seven places last year to the 88th most peaceful country.
Rates are at historic lows of 3.53% for 30-year mortgages. Rents are at record levels all over the country, hitting highs in 74 markets tracked by real-estate-data provider Reis Inc. And housing prices appear to have finally begun increasing, with gains posted for three months in a row according to the index put out by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. So why aren’t more Americans buying houses?
The answer to that is rather complex, but one major factor is that trade-up buyers — folks who upgrade from smaller, cheaper “starter homes” to pricier properties, and who classically are a pumping piston in the engine that drives the housing market — are finding it difficult, if not impossible, to trade up right now. This key segment of the market is especially likely to be “equity poor.”
Never before in human history have so many people been on the move […] airfare, new technologies […] space and time have never been so compressed. […] Migrants are no longer just ‘migrants’ but have become ‘transnationals’ maintaining links between their country of origin, their current country, and, not unusually, other countries where they have spent time.
The cool imagery of the new transnationalism is sometimes ruptured by analysts pointing out how class and race constrain or enable different forms of transnationalism. […] Qureshi starts with the observation that, according to the literature, Pakistanis in Britain have
developed a ‘transnational ethnic world’ that is continually reproduced through longdistance phone calls, frequent return visits and holidays, the consumption of circulating goods and media products, exchanges of gifts, philanthropic investments in schools, hospitals and humanitarian projects in Pakistan and so forth (Qureshi 2012, p. 2).
Descriptions of a British-Pakistani transnational world such as these are based on normalized assumptions of healthy, materially secure migrants whose first priority is their cultural and ethnic identity. The chronically ill men the researcher encountered in East London told a different story, a story where their ailing bodies tied them to London. […]
Their lack of financial resources has tied them to London and has made practices of transnationalism difficult: for instance, ‘cheap’ airfares are not ‘cheap’ to them but involve years of budgeting ahead and borrowing; their disability coupled with the fact that Pakistanis back home see them as ‘rich’ and expect bribes and presents at every turn, makes movement in Pakistan difficult and unpleasant for them; and, phone cards, the so-called ‘social glue’ of transnationalism, have to be carefully rationed.
Many CEOs, including Dow Chemicals’ Andrew Liveris, have declared their intentions to bring manufacturing back to the United States. What is going to accelerate the trend isn’t, as people believe, the rising cost of Chinese labor or a rising yuan. The real threat to China comes from technology. […]
Several technologies advancing and converging will cause this. First, robotics. […] Robots are now capable of performing surgery, milking cows, doing military reconnaissance and combat, and flying fighter jets. Several companies, such Willow Garage, iRobot, and 9th Sense, sell robot-development kits for which university students and open-source communities are developing ever more sophisticated applications. The factory assembly that China is currently performing is child’s play compared to the next generation of robots. […]
Then there is artificial intelligence. […]
Other advances in the next decade will likely affect manufacturing, particularly advances in nanotechnology that change the equation further. Engineers and scientists are today developing new types of materials, such as carbon nanotubes, ceramic-matrix nanocomposites, and new carbon fibers. These new materials make it possible to create products that are stronger, lighter, more energy-efficient, and more durable than existing manufactured goods. A new field — “molecular manufacturing” — will take this one step further and make it possible to program molecules inexpensively, with atomic precision.
Fallout continues from the MOCA board’s removal of chief curator Paul Schimmel.
“Jeffrey has always been supportive of my work, but I don’t understand the direction he’s taking the museum right now,” McCarthy said. “I see it as placating the populace. It’s not really what art’s about, but a ratings game.”
Among those in Deitch’s corner is Shepard Fairey, an art star of a younger generation, especially since he designed the “Hope” poster that became the unofficial image of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. (The design firm Fairey founded, Studio One, is now handling much of MOCA’s design work.)
In an email, Fairey, 42, praised Deitch’s “astute understanding of the interconnected nature of high and low art culture. When I say low, I don’t mean inferior.”
…a bizarre affliction that has been widely reported in the media to affect around a dozen of the approximately one million Japanese tourists who visit Paris each year. Paris Syndrome is said to occur when a combination of factors leave tourists with a particularly severe case of culture shock.
Symptoms are purported to include:
acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, or hostility from others), derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia (and) sweating
…New York the most linguistically diverse city in the world. […]
While there is no precise count, some experts believe New York is home to as many as 800 languages — far more than the 176 spoken by students in the city’s public schools or the 138 that residents of Queens, New York’s most diverse borough, listed on their 2000 census forms. […]
New York is such a rich laboratory for languages on the decline that the City University Graduate Center is organizing an endangered-languages program. […]
In addition to dozens of Native American languages, vulnerable foreign languages that researchers say are spoken in New York include Aramaic, Chaldic and Mandaic from the Semitic family; Bukhari (a Bukharian Jewish language, which has more speakers in Queens than in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan); Chamorro (from the Mariana Islands); Irish Gaelic; Kashubian (from Poland); indigenous Mexican languages; Pennsylvania Dutch; Rhaeto-Romanic (spoken in Switzerland); Romany (from the Balkans); and Yiddish.
Researchers plan to canvass a tiny Afghan neighborhood in Flushing, Queens, for Ormuri, which is believed to be spoken by a small number of people in Pakistan and Afghanistan. […]
In northern New Jersey, Neo-Aramaic, rooted in the language of Jesus and the Talmud, is still spoken by Syrian immigrants and is taught at Syriac Orthodox churches in Paramus and Teaneck. […] And on Long Island, researchers have found several people fluent in Mandaic, a Persian variation of Aramaic spoken by a few hundred people around the world.
In 1991, former MIT dean Lester Thurow wrote: “If one looks at the last 20 years, Japan would have to be considered the betting favorite to win the economy honors of owning the 21st century.”
It hasn’t, and it likely won’t. But 20 years ago, the view was nearly universal. Japan’s economy was breathtaking — rapid growth, innovation, and efficiency like no one had seen. From 1960 to 1990, real per-capital GDP grew by nearly 6%, double the rate of America’s.
But then it all stopped. […]
There are two key numbers to watch when looking at demographics: the percentage of the population that’s of working age (15-64), and the percent likely to be in retirement (over 65).
Though all countries age, within four decades the U.S. will likely have one of the lowest percentages of elderly citizens, and one of the highest rates of working-age bodies among large economies. China, meanwhile, will see its working-age population plunge and its elderly ranks soar — an echo of its one-child policy. Europe falls deeper into age-based stagnation. Alas, Japan becomes the global equivalent of Boca Raton.
Dr. Mark Ryan, director at the Louisiana Poison Center, called bath salts “the worst drug” he has seen in his 20 years there. “With LSD, you might see pink elephants, but with this drug, you see demons, aliens, extreme paranoia, heart attacks, and superhuman strength like Superman,” Ryan has said. “If you had a reaction, it was a bad reaction.”
Starting in late 2010, an influx of violent, irrational, self-destructive users began to congest hospital ERs throughout the States. A 19-year-old West Virginia man claimed he was high on bath salts when he stabbed his neighbor’s pygmy goat while wearing women’s underwear; a Mississippi man skinned himself alive while under the influence. Users staggered in, or were carried in, consumed by extreme panic, tachycardia, deep paranoia, and heart-attack symptoms. (Perhaps the most infamous incident tied to bath salts is Rudy Eugene’s horrific naked face-eating attack in Miami in May, although conclusive toxicology reports have yet to be released; still, the fact that this feels like the closest thing to a credible explanation for chewing a homeless man’s head for 18 minutes speaks volumes about the drug’s reputation.)
Because the chemicals most often found in bath salts — mephedrone, methylenedioxypyrovalerone, and methylone — were not outlawed initially, a nearly year-and-a-half period ensued where, to the horror of law enforcement, salts were sold legally and widely, not only in head shops, but in gas stations and convenience stores all over the U.S. In 2010, 304 calls were made to poison control centers nationwide regarding bath salts. A year later, the calls skyrocketed to 6,138. […]
DEA officials believe that the base compounds are manufactured primarily in China and India and then imported into the U.S., where traffickers cut and mix the drug in a variety of ways — just one of the reasons why even the first hit of salts can produce unpredictable results.
“Some of these manufacturers will mix these substances purposefully or not purposefully,” says Jeffrey Comparin, a senior DEA laboratory director. “There’s zero quality control. You have no idea what you’re putting in your body.”
For the past two decades New Yorkers have been the beneficiaries of the largest and longest sustained drop in street crime ever experienced by a big city in the developed world. In less than a generation, rates of several common crimes that inspire public fear — homicide, robbery and burglary — dropped by more than 80 percent. […]
Twenty years ago most criminologists and sociologists would have doubted that a metropolis could reduce this kind of crime by so much. Although the scale of New York Citys success is now well known and documented, most people may not realize that the city’s experience showed many of modern America’s dominant assumptions concerning crime to be flat wrong, including that lowering crime requires first tackling poverty, unemployment and drug use and that it requires throwing many people in jail or moving minorities out of city centers. Instead New York made giant strides toward solving its crime problem without major changes in its racial and ethnic profile; it did so without lowering poverty and unemployment more than other cities; and it did so without either winning its war on drugs or participating in the mass incarceration that has taken place throughout the rest of the nation.
Country number four, Spain, gets bailed out and we all of course know that it won’t be the last. Though I wondered over the weekend whether perhaps I was missing something, because when the Spanish prime minister Mr Rajoy got up, he said that this bailout shows what a success the eurozone has been.
And I thought, well, having listened to him over the previous couple of weeks telling us that there would not be a bailout, I got the feeling after all his twists and turns he’s just about the most incompetent leader in the whole of Europe, and that’s saying something, because there is pretty stiff competition. […]
I tell you, any banking analyst will tell you, 100 billion does not solve the Spanish banking problem, it would need to be more like 400 billion.
Historically, casinos have been eager adopters of technologies that help them to gather knowledge about their customers. The knowledge-gathering repertoire of the modern casino has shifted from telephone surveys, focus groups, and rudimentary datasets to complex feats of reconnaissance and analysis enabled by player tracking systems, data visualization tools, and behavioral intelligence software suites.
Many surveillance techniques first applied in casinos were only later adapted to other domains—airports, financial trading floors, shopping malls, banks, and government agencies. […]
Nearly 70 percent of casino patrons in the United States participate in so-called loyalty programs, using player cards to gamble rather than coins, paper money, or tickets. While their participation grants them redeemable points based on the volume of their play, it grants casinos a wealth of information. Casino player tracking systems, inspired by airline and credit card reward programs in the mid-1980s, record the value of each bet gamblers make, their wins and losses, the rate at which they push slot machine buttons, and what drinks and meals they purchase.
Tracked gamblers are treated less as individual subjects than as “dividuals” in the Deleuzian sense—collections of traits, habits, and preferences that casinos can systematically compare to those of others in order to identify distinct customer niches.
Harrah’s, a franchise that tracks players seamlessly from coast to coast by pooling information from its national chain of properties into a single centralized database, parses its market into ninety different segments and addresses each with a unique marketing scheme. […]
As in the case of online venues like Amazon.com, individuals’ consumer behavior in casinos, recorded in a common data cloud and refracted through statistical analysis, becomes the basis for group classifications of which they may not be aware but in which they continue to participate—sometimes more robustly as a result of the customized product marketing that follows.
China is a kleptocracy of a scale never seen before in human history. This post aims to explain how this wave of theft is financed, what makes it sustainable and what will make it fail.
A census of workplace microbes found that men’s offices have significantly more than women’s, and offices in New York have more than those in San Francisco.
Science-fiction writers once imagined a galactic currency that would grease the wheels of commerce from here to Alpha Centauri. In fact, however, we are tending in precisely the other direction, toward a burgeoning number of ever more specialized currencies. These will circulate electronically, by means of the mobile phones that are increasingly part of the dress of every person on the planet.
Seemingly everywhere you look, you can see the emergence of this pattern in what futurologists call the weak signals [PDF] of change. These are the changes that will be seen, a generation from now, to have foreshadowed a technological revolution. […]
In Japan and Korea, mobile phones have been used for payments for a decade, and the technology is now a standard feature there in handsets. In March, one out of six Japanese users bought something in a shop using a mobile. People also use the system to pay bills and transit fares; businesses use it to funnel loyalty rewards to customers. At first, the number of retailers accepting the new technology remained flat; once about a third of consumers were using it, though, things started to take off, producing the “hockey stick” adoption curve that we technologists love.
What’s happening in Africa is even more astonishing. Kenya is now home to the world’s most expansive mobile payments scheme, M-Pesa. […] A third of Kenya’s gross domestic product now flows through M-Pesa. […]
The rest of the world is starting to move. […] In France, mobile phone operators and banks have gotten together to launch a system for mobile proximity payments, which lets a chip-bearing platform transfer money when held close to the reader. In Germany, meanwhile, the mobile phone operators have decided to ignore the banks and go it alone. In the United States, Google is working with Sprint and MasterCard to launch Google Wallet. […]
Cash’s indirect costs are huge. […] In the United States 18 to 19 percent of total reportable income is hidden from federal tax men, a shortfall of about US $500 billion. […]
In the Netherlands, there are commercial streets that are cash free. […] In Sweden the labor unions want to remove cash from shops and banks because it is their members who get beaten and shot in robberies; the government wants to reduce the burden of police work.
{ Who do we have here? This is Eddie. We’re just cruising. He’s a dude magnet. My office is on Wall Street, and if I’m with Eddie, guys just surround me. They say, “Oh my God, I used to have one of these when I was living in the country!” Or whatever. I doubt that short dress hurts. I don’t know. No one talks to me unless I’m with the dog. | NY mag | Continue reading }
