Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged statistic

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

Democratic Presidents Are Better for the Economy - Bloomberg - 1 views

www.bloomberg.com/...re-better-for-the-economy.html

US president performance economic statistics comparative historical

shared by Javier E on 30 Jun 12 - Cached
  • After three years in office, President Barack Obama has enough of a record to judge against the economic performances of other recent presidents. The rankings can help you cast a more informed vote in November
  • In “The President as Economist: Scoring Economic Performance From Harry Truman to Barack Obama,” I compare the 12 presidents since World War II using 17 economic indicators, including growth in gross domestic product, rate of unemployment, inflation, population below the poverty line, increase in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, savings and investment rates, exports and trade balances, federal budget growth, and debt and federal taxes as a share of GDP.
  • The book examines each indicator for each administration, and boils down the many aspects of a president’s economic performance to a single score. The scores are derived using basic statistical methods, including averaging each president’s indicators, then determining standard deviations from the mean. These methods produce a common unit of comparison for indicators that are expressed in different units, such as growth rates and shares of GDP.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Presidents Harry S Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson rank first through third.
  • Presidents George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush make up the bottom three.
  • President Ronald Reagan is No. 8, just one slot above President Obama.
  • there are six Republicans and six Democrats, so if we take the average for Democratic and Republican presidents we can make a head-to-head party comparison
  • The Democratic presidents scored substantially higher than the Republican presidents, with a score of 26.95. Republican presidents scored -26.95.
  • Five out of six Democrats reduced the national debt as a percentage of GDP, while four out of six Republicans raised it. The story is similar on budget deficits, with five of the top six performances recorded by Democrats and four of the bottom five recorded by Republicans.
  • With respect to GDP growth, three of the top four performers were Democrats and four of the bottom five were Republicans. In reducing the poverty rate, the top three were Democrats and two of the bottom three were Republicans. The Democrats also had a better record on employment.
  • Republicans had better records on reducing inflation, achieving four of the top five performances, while Democrats had four of the bottom five showings. Republicans also did well in lowering tax revenue as a percentage of GDP, claiming the top five spots.
  • what does this tell us about Obama? When all of the indicators are combined, he ranks ninth out of 12, one position below Reagan but above Bush 41, Carter and Bush 43. Obama is also well below the midpoint that falls between Clinton and Nixon. For Republicans who view Reagan as an economic miracle- maker and Obama as, well, something less than that, it might come as a shock that Obama falls next in line in economic performance.
  • Lined up against his contemporaries after 1977, Obama ranks third out of six.
Javier E

The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-a-climate-change-skeptic.html

global warming climate research results

shared by Javier E on 29 Jul 12 - Cached
  • Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
  • Our Berkeley Earth approach used sophisticated statistical methods developed largely by our lead scientist, Robert Rohde, which allowed us to determine earth land temperature much further back in time. We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions.
  • The historic temperature pattern we observed has abrupt dips that match the emissions of known explosive volcanic eruptions; the particulates from such events reflect sunlight, make for beautiful sunsets and cool the earth’s surface for a few years. There are small, rapid variations attributable to El Niño and other ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream; because of such oscillations, the “flattening” of the recent temperature rise that some people claim is not, in our view, statistically significant. What has caused the gradual but systematic rise of two and a half degrees? We tried fitting the shape to simple math functions (exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to rising functions like world population. By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • our record is long enough that we could search for the fingerprint of solar variability, based on the historical record of sunspots. That fingerprint is absent.
  • How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does.
  • What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years.
Javier E

Essay-Grading Software, as Teacher's Aide - Digital Domain - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...chers-aide-digital-domain.html

writing teaching essay evaluation computer automation software program

shared by Javier E on 10 Jun 12 - Cached
  • AS a professor and a parent, I have long dreamed of finding a software program that helps every student learn to write well. It would serve as a kind of tireless instructor, flagging grammatical, punctuation or word-use problems, but also showing the way to greater concision and clarity.
  • The standardized tests administered by the states at the end of the school year typically have an essay-writing component, requiring the hiring of humans to grade them one by one.
  • the Hewlett Foundation sponsored a study of automated essay-scoring engines now offered by commercial vendors. The researchers found that these produced scores effectively identical to those of human graders.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • humans are not necessarily ideal graders: they provide an average of only three minutes of attention per essa
  • We are talking here about providing a very rough kind of measurement, the assignment of a single summary score on, say, a seventh grader’s essay
  • “A few years back, almost all states evaluated writing at multiple grade levels, requiring students to actually write,” says Mark D. Shermis, dean of the college of education at the University of Akron in Ohio. “But a few, citing cost considerations, have either switched back to multiple-choice format to evaluate or have dropped writing evaluation altogether.”
  • As statistical models for automated essay scoring are refined, Professor Shermis says, the current $2 or $3 cost of grading each one with humans could be virtually eliminated, at least theoretically.
  • the cost of commercial essay-grading software is now $10 to $20 a student per year. But as the technology improves and the costs drop, he expects that it will be incorporated into the word processing software that all students use
  • As essay-scoring software becomes more sophisticated, it could be put to classroom use for any type of writing assignment throughout the school year, not just in an end-of-year assessment. Instead of the teacher filling the essay with the markings that flag problems, the software could do so. The software could also effortlessly supply full explanations and practice exercises that address the problems — and grade those, too.
  • “Providing students with instant feedback about grammar, punctuation, word choice and sentence structure will lead to more writing assignments,” Mr. Vander Ark says, “and allow teachers to focus on higher-order skills.”
  • When sophisticated essay-evaluation software is built into word processing software, Mr. Vander Ark predicts “an order-of-magnitude increase in the amount of writing across the curriculum.”
  • the essay-scoring software that he and his teammates developed uses relatively small data sets and ordinary PCs — so the additional infrastructure cost for schools could be nil.
  • the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation sponsored a competition to see how well algorithms submitted by professional data scientists and amateur statistics wizards could predict the scores assigned by human graders. The winners were announced last month — and the predictive algorithms were eerily accurate.
  • wanted to create a neutral and fair platform to assess the various claims of the vendors. It turns out the claims are not hype.”
Javier E

Lars Peter Hansen, the Nobel Laureate in the Middle - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...el-laureate-in-the-middle.html

economics science irrationality modeling

shared by Javier E on 17 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • The Nobel committee recognized Professor Hansen this year for developing a statistical technique, the generalized method of moments. He described it as “a method that allows you to do something without having to do everything.” For example, it’s still impossible to come up with a complete and entirely coherent model of either the overall economy or financial markets, to say nothing of combining the two. But his methods help make it possible to study some of the elements and connections in a statistically valid way. “The idea is to make progress,” he said, “even if you can’t do it all now.” And his approach is in wide use in other areas of social science.
  • The science of economic model-building is very much a work in progress, he said. “The thing to remember about models is they’re always approximations and they will always turn out to be wrong,” he said. That shouldn’t be a surprise, he said, and it doesn’t mean that the models are useless. “You need to ask, are the models wrong in ways that are central to the questions you want to ask, or are they wrong in ways that aren’t so central?” The important thing is to make them better and to come up with interesting answers, he said.
  • Prevailing economic models do not adequately explain the financial crisis, the severe recession or the weak global recovery, he said. “Systemic risk” is a buzzword for politicians and financial regulators, he said, but “the truth is, we really don’t know how to measure it or what exactly it is.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “If you simply announce that things are irrational, then that alone doesn’t get you very far. You have to replace rational agents with some concrete notion of what it means to be irrational.” You need to test that notion in a formal, mathematical model, he said. Some of his students have been working at this. “As long as they’re doing this in formal and rigorous ways, I’m all in favor of it.”
  • He’s at work, with other scholars, to improve the quality of such models, with the hope “that in five or 10 years we’ll have much better answers.” Not complete answers, but better ones.
Javier E

Children and Guns - The Hidden Toll - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-and-guns-the-hidden-toll.html

guns children research accidental

shared by Javier E on 29 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • A New York Times review of hundreds of child firearm deaths found that accidental shootings occurred roughly twice as often as the records indicate, because of idiosyncrasies in how such deaths are classified by the authorities.
  • The National Rifle Association cited the lower official numbers this year in a fact sheet opposing “safe storage” laws, saying children were more likely to be killed by falls, poisoning or environmental factors — an incorrect assertion if the actual number of accidental firearm deaths is significantly higher.
  • The rifle association’s lobbying arm recently posted on its Web site a claim that adult criminals who mishandle firearms — as opposed to law-abiding gun owners — are responsible for most fatal accidents involving children. But The Times’s review found that a vast majority of cases revolved around children’s access to firearms, with the shooting either self-inflicted or done by another child.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • In all but a handful of instances, the shooter was male. Boys also accounted for more than 80 percent of the victims.
  • The Times sought to identify every accidental firearm death of a child age 14 and under in Georgia, Minnesota, North Carolina and Ohio dating to 1999, and in California to 2007. Records were also obtained from several county medical examiners’ offices in Florida, Illinois and Texas.
  • Even in accidental shootings where criminals were in some way involved, they usually were not the ones pulling the trigger. Rather, they — like many law-abiding adults in these cases — simply left a gun unsecured.
  • Another important aspect of firearm accidents is that a vast majority of victims do not die. Tracking these injuries nationally, however, is arguably just as problematic as tallying fatalities, according to public health researchers. In fact, national figures often cited from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web site are an estimate, projected from a sampling taken from hospital emergency departments. Nevertheless, in 2011, the most recent year with available data, the agency estimated that there were 847 unintentional nonfatal firearm injuries among children 14 and under.
  • More concrete are actual counts of emergency department visits, which are available in a small number of states. In North Carolina, for instance, there were more than 120 such visits for nonfatal gun accidents among children 17 and under in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available.
  • While about 60 percent of the accidental firearm deaths identified by The Times involved handguns as opposed to long guns, that number was much higher — more than 85 percent — when the victims were very young, under the age of 6. In fact, the average handgun victim was several years younger than long gun victims: between 7 and 8, compared with almost 11.
  • Over all, the largest number of deaths came at the upper end of the age range, with ages 13 and 14 being most common — not necessarily surprising, given that parents generally allow adolescents greater access to guns. But the third-most common age was 3 (tied with 12), a particularly vulnerable age, when children are curious and old enough to manipulate a firearm but ignorant of the dangers.
  • About half of the accidents took place inside the child’s home. A third, however, occurred at the house of a friend or a relative, pointing to a potential vulnerability if safe-storage laws apply only to households with children, as in North Carolina.
  • In four of the five states — California, Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio — The Times identified roughly twice as many accidental killings as were tallied in the corresponding federal data.
  • But Taurus backed out within a few months, citing competing priorities, and the project fell apart. Charles Vehlow, Metal Storm’s chief executive at the time, said that while he did not know exactly what pressures Taurus faced, there was a general wariness of smart-gun efforts among manufacturers and pro-gun groups. “There was no question that the N.R.A. was very sensitive and was aware of what we were doing,” he said.
  • Under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures, in fact, gun accidents were the ninth-leading cause of unintentional deaths among children ages 1 to 14 in 2010. (The agency reported 62 such killings that year.) If the actual numbers are, in fact, roughly double, however, gun accidents would rise into the top five or six.
  • The rifle association and its allies also often note that studies on the impact of safe-storage laws have found mixed results. But those studies are based on the flawed government statistics. “When we’re evaluating child access laws, we’re using total trash data,
  • A safe-storage bill was introduced in the Ohio legislature in February, prompted by a shooting that killed three students at a high school in suburban Cleveland. But the measure, which would prohibit storing a firearm in a residence in a place readily accessible to a child, has encountered skepticism from the Republicans who control the legislature. “The tenor was, somebody breaks in, do I have time enough to get to my gun?” said State Representative Bill Patmon, a Democrat who introduced the bill.
  • The N.R.A. has long argued that better education is the key to preventing gun accidents, citing its Eddie Eagle GunSafe program, which teaches children as young as 3 that if they see a gun, they should “stop, don’t touch, leave the area and tell an adult.” The association, which did not respond to a request for comment, says its program has reached more than 26 million children in all 50 states and should be credited for the deep decline in accidental gun deaths shown in federal statistics dating to the mid-1980s.
  • Beyond the unreliability of the federal data, public health experts have disputed the N.R.A.’s claims, pointing to other potential explanations for the decline, including improvements in emergency medical care, along with data showing fewer households with firearms. They also highlight research indicating that admonishing children to stay away from guns is often ineffective.
  • As part of Dr. Kellermann’s study, researchers watched through a one-way mirror as pairs of boys ages 8 to 12 were left alone in an examination room at a clinic in Atlanta. Unknown to the children, an inoperative .38-caliber handgun was concealed in a cabinet drawer.
  • Playing and exploring over the next 15 minutes, one boy after another — three-quarters of the 64 children — found the gun. Two-thirds handled it, and one-third actually pulled the trigger. Just one child went to tell an adult about the gun, and he was teased by his peers for it. More than 90 percent of the boys said they had had some gun safety instruction.
  • Other research has found that simply having a firearm in the household is correlated with an increased risk of accidental shooting death. In one study, published in 2003 in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention, the risk was more than three times as high for one gun, and almost four times as high for more than one.
  • requiring, or even encouraging, efforts to introduce “smart gun” technology remains unpopular with the gun lobby, which has worked to undermine such research and attempts to regulate firearms as a dangerous consumer product.
  • In state after state and often with considerable success, gun rights groups have cited the federal numbers as proof that the problem is nearly inconsequential and that storage laws are unnecessary. Gun Owners of America says on its Web site that children are “130 percent more likely to die from choking on their dinner” than from accidental shootings.
  • The Colt’s Manufacturing Company and Smith & Wesson experienced a backlash against their own smart-gun programs, which were abandoned amid financial problems caused, in part, by boycotts from gun groups and others in the industry. So unpopular was the whole smart-gun concept that Colt’s Manufacturing later could not even find a buyer for its patents, said Carlton Chen, a former lawyer for the company.
  • Gun rights lobbyists have also helped keep firearms and ammunition beyond the reach of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which has the power to regulate other products that are dangerous to children. The N.R.A. argues that the commission would provide a back door for gun control advocates to restrict the manufacture of firearms. Proponents of regulation say guns pose too great a hazard to exclude them from scrutiny.
Javier E

South Korea's war against tiny cameras - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-9b0d-749fb254bc3d_story.html

surveillance spying camera privacy

shared by Javier E on 04 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • the activity was dubbed “molka” years ago — the problem appears to be growing. The number of suspected perpetrators identified by police rose from 1,354 in 2011 to 5,363 in 2017; more than 95 percent were men
  • Police say that the wider availability of smartphones, as well as the rise of social media, contributed to this increase. Indeed, despite the focus on hidden cameras, 90 percent of the crimes involved filming with regular smartphones, statistics show
  • Police identified more than 26,000 victims of illicit filming between 2012 and 2016, over 80 percent of them female. But many never find out they are victims: The real number “would be 10 times higher than the police figure” if the full extent were know
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • A lot of the work is educational, Chae said. At a police-run facility, visitors are shown objects that contain a hidden camera: a baseball hat, a belt, a watch, a lighter, a USB stick, a necktie, a set of car keys. A sign warns that a man could install a camera in his shoe. There are even two hidden cameras in the room. Visitors are asked: Can you spot them?
  • Violators currently face up to five years in prison or a fine of up to about $9,000. Police statistics from the past five years showed that only 5.3 percent of those indicted on illegal filming charges went to prison, Kim said
Javier E

The unhappy states of America: Despite an improving economy, Americans are glum - The W... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ing-economy-americans-are-glum

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Americans are more glum now than they were during the Great Recession
  • 2017 turned out to be the worst year for well-being on record. The overall index score was even lower than during the financial crisis, and, for the first time in the decade that Gallup has done this poll, no state in the country showed a statistically significant increase in well-being.
  • In 2009, a year when 15 states showed declines in well-being, money and financial worries were at the top of the list. Today, emotional and psychological factors dominate. People are not content in their jobs and relationships, and depression diagnoses are at an all-time high in the United States.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Some blame politics and polarization for causing people to feel more anxiety and bitterness toward work colleagues and family. There's a constant narrative of division in the country between Republicans and Democrats, gun-rights supporters and gun-control advocates, the religious and the nonreligious, and so on. And there are near daily headlines about chaos in the White House.
  • “We don’t know what is going to happen next. There’s no clear path toward stabilizing either the country or the world.”
  • Almost every demographic group dropped in well-being in 2017 — except for wealthy white men. Women, African Americans, Hispanics and lower-income households (those earning less than $48,000 a year) all saw substantial drops in their perception of their well-being.
  • Democrats also showed far bigger declines than Republicans or independents. “Switching out the person in the Oval Office can and does have an effect on well-being,”
  • While consumer confidence is at the highest level since 2004, polls that look at broader issues than income and spending power don't appear as rosy.
  • Forty percent of American adults now say they are lonely, double the share of people who said that in the 1980s, according to AARP. Some people are even struggling to feel connected to their work colleagues
  • In 2017, the No. 1 fear was corrupt government officials followed by the overall state of health care and worries about pollution. There was also a significant jump last year in fears about the United States getting into another world war.
  • In 2017, half of Americans said one of their top fears was “not having enough money for the future,” a reminder that even if people have jobs now, they remain anxious because they aren't sure how long that will last.
  • “People are feeling more economically insecure, even if they have a job and a salary,” said Rachel Schneider, co-author of “The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty.” “I think it's a combination of knowing you're responsible for your own retirement, knowing you're responsible for your own health care and knowing that you don't have any significant job security.”
  • There's a growing push from academics and even Wall Street bankers, such as hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio, to get politicians to look beyond the national statistics on jobs and economic. Those numbers aren't painting the full picture of how Americans are doing, let alone feeling, experts say.
  • Despite the improving economy, the fear of running out of money down the road jumped nearly 10 points from the year before, and it was followed closely by fears of “high medical bills.”
Javier E

What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer - The Ne... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hootings-us-international.html

guns debate international

shared by Javier E on 17 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • there is one quirk that consistently puzzles America’s fans and critics alike. Why, they ask, does it experience so many mass shootings?
  • Perhaps, some speculate, it is because American society is unusually violent. Or its racial divisions have frayed the bonds of society. Or its citizens lack proper mental care under a health care system that draws frequent derision abroad.
  • Though seemingly sensible, all have been debunked by research on shootings elsewhere in the world. Instead, an ever-growing body of research consistently reaches the same conclusion.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.
  • Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world’s guns. From 1966 to 2012, 31 percent of the gunmen in mass shootings worldwide were American
  • Adjusted for population, only Yemen has a higher rate of mass shootings among countries with more than 10 million people — a distinction Mr. Lankford urged to avoid outliers. Yemen has the world’s second-highest rate of gun ownership after the United States.
  • Worldwide, Mr. Lankford found, a country’s rate of gun ownership correlated with the odds it would experience a mass shooting. This relationship held even when he excluded the United States, indicating that it could not be explained by some other factor particular to his home country
  • And it held when he controlled for homicide rates, suggesting that mass shootings were better explained by a society’s access to guns than by its baseline level of violence.
  • If mental health made the difference, then data would show that Americans have more mental health problems than do people in other countries with fewer mass shootings. But the mental health care spending rate in the United States, the number of mental health professionals per capita and the rate of severe mental disorders are all in line with those of other wealthy countries.
  • A 2015 study estimated that only 4 percent of American gun deaths could be attributed to mental health issues
  • countries with high suicide rates tended to have low rates of mass shootings — the opposite of what you would expect if mental health problems correlated with mass shootings.
  • Whether a population plays more or fewer video games also appears to have no impact. Americans are no more likely to play video games than people in any other developed country
  • Racial diversity or other factors associated with social cohesion also show little correlation with gun deaths. Among European countries, there is little association between immigration or other diversity metrics and the rates of gun murders or mass shootings.
  • America’s gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. In Canada and Britain, it was 5 per million and 0.7 per million, respectively, which also corresponds with differences in gun ownership
  • the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries, according to a landmark 1999 study by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins of the University of California, Berkeley.
  • Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.
  • They concluded that the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to guns.
  • More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities and when controlling for crime rates. And gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries.This suggests that the guns themselves cause the violence.
  • From 2000 and 2014, it found, the United States death rate by mass shooting was 1.5 per one million people. The rate was 1.7 in Switzerland and 3.4 in Finland, suggesting American mass shootings were not actually so common.
  • But the same study found that the United States had 133 mass shootings. Finland had only two, which killed 18 people, and Switzerland had one, which killed 14. In short, isolated incidents. So while mass shootings can happen anywhere, they are only a matter of routine in the United States.
  • In China, about a dozen seemingly random attacks on schoolchildren killed 25 people between 2010 and 2012. Most used knives; none used a gun.
  • By contrast, in this same window, the United States experienced five of its deadliest mass shootings, which killed 78 people. Scaled by population, the American attacks were 12 times as deadly.
  • In 2013, American gun-related deaths included 21,175 suicides, 11,208 homicides and 505 deaths caused by an accidental discharge. That same year in Japan, a country with one-third America’s population, guns were involved in only 13 deaths.
  • This means an American is about 300 times more likely to die by gun homicide or accident than a Japanese person. America’s gun ownership rate is 150 times as high as Japan’s.
  • That gap between 150 and 300 shows that gun ownership statistics alone do not explain what makes America different.
  • The United States also has some of the weakest controls over who may buy a gun and what sorts of guns may be owned.
  • Switzerland has the second-highest gun ownership rate of any developed country, about half that of the United States. Its gun homicide rate in 2004 was 7.7 per million people
  • Swiss gun laws are more stringent, setting a higher bar for securing and keeping a license, for selling guns and for the types of guns that can be owned. Such laws reflect more than just tighter restrictions. They imply a different way of thinking about guns, as something that citizens must affirmatively earn the right to own.
  • The United States is one of only three countries, along with Mexico and Guatemala, that begin with the opposite assumption: that people have an inherent right to own guns.
  • The main reason American regulation of gun ownership is so weak may be the fact that the trade-offs are simply given a different weight in the United States than they are anywhere else.
  • After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 shooting. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society.
  • That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what most sets the United States apart.
  • “In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”
Javier E

When the facts don't matter, how can democracy survive? - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-9b7c-57290af48a49_story.html

facts democracy logic policy culture politics knowledge truth nihilism

shared by Javier E on 18 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • a Marketplace-Edison Research Poll
  • The survey found that more than 4 in 10 Americans somewhat or completely distrust the economic data reported by the federal government
  • Among Donald Trump voters, the share is 68 percent, with nearly half saying they don’t trust government economic data “at all.”
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • One risk of this apparently widespread suspicion is that it could become self-fulfilling. If enough people and businesses believe the economy is secretly terrible, they will behave in ways that make it terrible — by curbing their own spending and hiring, for example. 
  • This distrust of public data is partly, though not entirely, Trump’s fault.
  • At times Trump has mused that “real” unemployment is as high as 42 percent , a comically hyperbolic figure
  • Such comments are part of his broader narrative of numerical nihilism, a political strategy of discrediting any statistic or fact that could obstruct his path to the presidency.
  • as World’s Worst Surrogate Ben Carson said Friday on MSNBC, “Let’s throw the economists out, and let’s use common sense.” Presumably Carson believes that all forms of expertise, including neurosurgical, should be similarly disposed of in favor of “common sense.”
  • this anti-intellectual, ignore-the-data attitude mostly owes its growth to a careless, conspiracy-theorizing league of (mostly) conservative politicians and pundits.
  • They elevated themselves by sowing distrust in traditional institutions and sources of authority, from the media to civil servants to scientists. They presented themselves as the sole truth-tellers, system de-riggers and messianic statistics unskewers, while maintaining that everyone else was feeding the public lies.
  • The problem with elevating yourself by tearing down the existing authoritative institutions is that once you succeed, you’ve established a road map for others to tear you down, too
  • This is how a democracy crumbles: not with a bang, but with data trutherism.
nrashkind

How are food supply networks coping with coronavirus? - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...business-52020648

shared by nrashkind on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Continuing pictures of empty shelves at UK supermarkets have sparked ongoing worries about food shortages.
  • The supermarkets are confident that they can cope, not least because there is a limit to how much people can sensibly stockpile. So they believe that shopping patterns should return to normal eventually.
  • Half of the food consumed in the UK comes from overseas, official figures show, with 30% coming from the European Union. Some basics like wheat to make flour for bread, or lamb chops, may well have come from the other side of the world.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Not only that, but the introduction of “just in time” manufacturing in recent years means that many companies don’t store the components necessary to keep their factories running. They are dependent on the parts arriving “just in time” from their suppliers, often from thousands of miles away.
  • There is also spare capacity that is now free to be used
  • For instance, the closure of car plants across the country means that their fleets of supply trucks will not be needed for the duration
  • The logistics industry seems confident that it can keep the shops supplied. Christopher Smelling, the Freight Transport Association's head of policy, says that the continuing empty shelves is a result of panic buying, and not a lack of supply.
  • The UK is also vulnerable because it does not operate in a vacuum, it imports almost half of its food, and therefore the smooth working of other countries supply chains is vital to our own.
  • At the moment this system still seems to be working. Goods are still arriving from Italy for instance, even though the country is in a shutdown
  • If coronavirus has shown us anything, it is how complicated and delicate supply chains have become
  • After this crisis has passed, there is bound to be immense pressure on companies and governments to strengthen and simplify them.
Javier E

Charles Murray Returns, Nodding to Caution but Still Courting Controversy - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-diversity-charles-murray.html

race gender studies conservative controversy culture

shared by Javier E on 13 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Charles Murray, who in 1994 co-authored “The Bell Curve,” with Richard J. Herrnstein, arguing in two notorious chapters that I.Q. differences between the races were mostly innate and mostly intractable. (They allowed that environmental factors play a part in I.Q., but held that the “balance of the evidence” put a genetic factor of 60 percent “on the low side.”) Social programs like welfare or early education intervention ought to be scrapped not only because they were fruitless but because they encouraged women with low I.Q. (“the wrong women”) to have more children
  • In the years since its publication, the book has been roundly discredited on moral, political and scientific grounds. Reviewing “The Bell Curve” in The New Yorker, Stephen Jay Gould called attention to the authors’ questionable use of statistics and cherry-picked data
  • Peer reviews found shoddy reasoning and mathematical errors (all in service of the book’s thesis). There have been debates about what I.Q. really measures (other than the ability to take I.Q. tests), and whether an individual’s I.Q. is as relatively unchangeable as the authors claimed.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • In The New York Review of Books, Charles Lane described the book’s “tainted sources.” The authors, he argued, were relying on fringe researchers, many of them supported by the Pioneer Fund, whose founding mandate was “race betterment,” achieved by promoting reproduction by the descendants of “white persons who settled in the original 13 colonies prior to the adoption of the Constitution and/or from related stocks.” Richard Lynn, for example, a self-described “scientific racist,”
  • Murray has been able to cloak himself in the mantle of the embattled intellectual, the purveyor of forbidden knowledge, while comfortably ensconced at the American Enterprise Institute, the influential think tank, for three decades.
  • “Human Diversity” is thick with reassurances to the reader, and caveats that individuals ought to be judged on their own merits. “I’m discussing some of the most incendiary topics in academia,” he writes, hastening to add that “the subtext of the chapters to come is that everyone should calm down.”
  • “Why think that what a newborn prefers to look at provides any kind of window, however grimy, into their future abilities and interests?”
  • Early indications might indicate some trouble for Murray. Last month, the psychologists Michelle N. Meyer, Patrick Turley and Daniel J. Benjamin issued a sharp rebuke to his use of their research on polygenic scores in his piece for The Wall Street Journal teasing the new book
  • He characterized polygenic scores as providing decisive insight into I.Q. that was “impervious to racism and other forms of prejudice.” In fact, the psychologists assert in response, “polygenic scores can and do reflect racism, sexism or other prejudices, as well as more benign environmental factors.”
  • several claims are plainly contentious, even to the lay reader. Take Murray’’s description of male brains as “systemizers” and female brains as “empathizers,” drawing on work of the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. Men are drawn to things, in other words, and women to people.
  • In 2000, Baron-Cohen and colleagues published a study of day-old babies that found that boys looked at mobiles longer (hence “systemizers”) and girls at faces (“empathizers”). This study has never been replicated, not even by Baron-Cohen.
  • We are on the cusp of a revolution, Murray argues. Advances in genetics and neuroscience promise to liberate the social sciences from a stifling orthodoxy that denies the differences between people by insisting that we are blank slates, our potential impeded only by our environments. He identifies three key tenets of this orthodoxy: Gender is a construct; race is a construct; and class is a function of privilege.
  • Or consider Murray’s interpretation of why women haven’t branched into more male-dominated fields over the last 30 years. Once again, he finds an explanation in the female preoccupation with people and emotion as opposed to the male orientation toward things and abstract thought.
  • Sexism cannot be the culprit, he claims. Now that outright prohibition of women entering male-dominated fields has ended, any vestigial opposition ought to have abated in “a matter of years.” Never mind the wealth of research showing the very real persisting impediments that Murray dismisses
  • “Race is a construct” is among the tenets Murray seeks to dismantle. Yet tucked midway through the book is the bland assertion that his evidence does not “deny the many ways in which race is a social construct.”
  • Despite its blizzard of statistics, the book’s most astonishing (and telling) declaration is on the first page. If “you have reached this page” — the first page, I remind you — “convinced that gender, race and class are all social constructs, and that any claims to the contrary are pseudoscience, you won’t get past the first few pages before you can’t stand it anymore. This book isn’t for you.” He continues smoothly: “Now that we’re alone...”
  • Now that we’re alone. This book is for the believers. Rigorous readers, skeptics, the unindoctrinated — you won’t be persuaded by “Human Diversity,” but why should that matter? You’re not even invited.
Javier E

Trump barrels toward calamity - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...pandemic-plan-survival-fittest

trump response pandemic crisis failure

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • With all the foresight of Napoleon invading Russia and all the caution of George Pickett charging the Union lines, Trump barreled ahead Tuesday with his plan to send Americans back to their workplaces — and, consequently, their airplanes, subways and restaurants — within 19 days, even as the rapidly spreading pandemic builds toward a peak.
  • “We’re opening up this incredible country,” he declared midday in the Rose Garden to Fox News interviewers, hours after the World Health Organization declared a “very large acceleration” of coronavirus infections in the United States, raising the prospect of this country becoming the pandemic’s new epicenter.
  • “I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” Trump declared. He went on to say he “wasn’t happy about” his public health experts’ recommendations, but he reluctantly accepted two weeks of restrictions because “we would have been unbelievably criticized for not doing it.”
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • If Trump succeeds in getting Americans to mix again in public at the height of the pandemic (many governors are unlikely to be so foolhardy with their constituents’ health), he will be risking the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions
  • Just a week into his tepid embrace of social distancing, he’s ready to abandon the fight against the virus and instead force Americans to accept a new strategy for dealing with a pandemic: survival of the fittest.
  • It won’t work: The economy won’t bounce back if people don’t feel safe. “There will be no normally functioning economy if our hospitals are overwhelmed and thousands of Americans of all ages, including our doctors and nurses, lay dying because we have failed to do what’s necessary to stop the virus,” Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), the third-ranking House Republican said on Twitter.
  • It’s bad politics. As bodies of the elderly pile up, "GOP" will forever stand for something different: Get Old People.
  • The annual chance of dying in a car crash is about 1 in 8,000. Seasonal flu mortality is 0.1 percent.
  • Above all, it’s immoral. Trump will be condemning to death the most vulnerable 1 or 2 percent who get the disease — and everybody else who can’t get medical care for heart attacks or injuries because hospitals are full.
  • “What is this, some modern Darwinian theory of natural selection?” asked an incredulous New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. “We are going to fight every way we can to save every life that we can,” the Democrat added.
  • Trump seems to be acting in near-total ignorance. “You can’t compare this to 1918,” he said of the great pandemic. “That was a flu where if you got it, you had a 50/50 chance or very close of dying.” In fact, the 1918 influenza mortality rate was 2.5 percent. The WHO puts coronavirus mortality at 3.4 percent, though that’s likely to fall.
  • Trump blithely proclaimed that “we can socially distance ourselves and go to work.” He suggested more hand-washing and less hand-shaking. “We lose thousands of people a year to the flu; we never turn the country off,” he said. “We lose much more than that to automobile accidents; we didn’t call up the automobile companies to say, ‘Stop making cars.’ ”
  • It’s illogical: If he really sees things quickly returning to normal, what’s the point of a $2 trillion emergency spending package?
  • Americans understand this. Seventy-two percent think it will take months or longer for the virus to be contained, a CBS-YouGov poll found. Americans can see it took China three months to control the virus with severe measures.
  • “This cure is worse than the problem,” he said. “In my opinion, more people are going to die if we allow this to continue.”On the basis of that uninformed speculation, a reckless Trump would sign death warrants for millions.
Javier E

Opinion | Who Is Immune to the Coronavirus? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-immunity.html

research science Covid-19 immunity vaccine

shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • No such human-challenge experiments have been conducted to study immunity to SARS and MERS. But measurements of antibodies in the blood of people who have survived those infections suggest that these defenses persist for some time: two years for SARS, according to one study, and almost three years for MERS, according to another one. However, the neutralizing ability of these antibodies — a measure of how well they inhibit virus replication — was already declining during the study periods.
  • These studies form the basis for an educated guess at what might happen with Covid-19 patients. After being infected with SARS-CoV-2, most individuals will have an immune response, some better than others. That response, it may be assumed, will offer some protection over the medium term — at least a year — and then its effectiveness might decline.
  • One concern has to do with the possibility of reinfection. South Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that 91 patients who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 and then tested negative for the virus later tested positive again. If some of these cases were indeed reinfections, they would cast doubt on the strength of the immunity the patients had developed.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Several of my colleagues and students and I have statistically analyzed thousands of seasonal coronavirus cases in the United States and used a mathematical model to infer that immunity over a year or so is likely for the two seasonal coronaviruses most closely related to SARS-CoV-2 — an indication perhaps of how immunity to SARS-CoV-2 itself might also behave.
  • Mild illness, in other words, might not always build up protection. Similarly, it will be important to study the immune responses of people with asymptomatic cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection to determine whether symptoms, and their severity, predict whether a person becomes immune.
  • the issue might be resolved by comparing the viral genome sequence from the first and the second periods of infection.
  • it is reasonable to assume that only a minority of the world’s population is immune to SARS-CoV-2, even in hard-hit areas. How could this tentative picture evolve as better data come in? Early hints suggest that it could change in either direction.
  • One recent study (not yet peer-reviewed) suggests that rather than, say, 10 times the number of detected cases, the United States may really have more like 100, or even 1,000, times the official number
  • if this one is correct, then herd immunity to SARS-CoV-2 could be building faster than the commonly reported figures suggest.
  • another recent study (also not yet peer-reviewed) suggests that not every case of infection may be contributing to herd immunity. Of 175 Chinese patients with mild symptoms of Covid-19, 70 percent developed strong antibody responses, but about 25 percent developed a low response and about 5 percent developed no detectable response at all
  • An alternative possibility, which many scientists think is more likely, is that these patients had a false negative test in the middle of an ongoing infection, or that the infection had temporarily subsided and then re-emerged
  • The balance between these uncertainties will become clearer when more serologic surveys, or blood tests for antibodies, are conducted on large numbers of people. Such studies are beginning and should show results soon. Of course, much will depend on how sensitive and specific the various tests are: how well they spot SARS-CoV-2 antibodies when those are present and if they can avoid spurious signals from antibodies to related viruses.
  • Based on the volunteer experiments with seasonal coronaviruses and the antibody-persistence studies for SARS and MERS, one might expect a strong immune response to SARS-CoV-2 to protect completely against reinfection and a weaker one to protect against severe infection and so still slow the virus’s spread.
  • But designing valid epidemiologic studies to figure all of this out is not easy — many scientists, including several teams of which I’m a part — are working on the issue right now.
  • getting a handle on this fast is extremely important: not only to estimate the extent of herd immunity, but also to figure out whether some people can re-enter society safely, without becoming infected again or serving as a vector, and spreading the virus to others. Central to this effort will be figuring out how long protection lasts.
  • Experimental and statistical evidence suggests that infection with one coronavirus can offer some degree of immunity against distinct but related coronaviruses.
  • then there is the question of immune enhancement: Through a variety of mechanisms, immunity to a coronavirus can in some instances exacerbate an infection rather than prevent or mitigate it.
  • administering a vaccine against dengue fever, a flavivirus infection, can sometimes make the disease worse.
  • concern that they might be at play is one of the obstacles that have slowed the development of experimental vaccines against SARS and MERS.
  • The good news is that research on SARS and MERS has begun to clarify how enhancement works, suggesting ways around it, and an extraordinary range of efforts is underway to find a vaccine for Covid-19, using multiple approaches.
andrespardo

African Americans bear the brunt of Covid-19's economic impact | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...yment-covid-19-economic-impact

inernational pandemic coronavirus crisis economics

shared by andrespardo on 28 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • African Americans bear the brunt of Covid-19's economic impact
  • Donald Trump once again praised his job creation record. “Black people right now are having the best, statistically, the best numbers that you’ve ever had, and it’s really an honor,” he said. “Nobody has done more for black people than I have. Nobody has done more.”
  • That was 27 February and Trump was also still claiming he had done an “incredible job” with the looming coronavirus pandemic. Now the virus has led 26 million Americans to file for unemployment. While the US Bureau of Labor Statistics will not release unemployment figures broken down by race until the beginning of next month, economists are certain that black Americans are suffering the brunt of Covid-19’s economic impact and will probably suffer the most dramatic consequences of the looming recession.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • 3.5%, a 50-year-low, the black unemployment rate was 5.8%. The white unemployment rate was 3.1%.
  • “Whatever is being projected for the national unemployment rate, in most instances, we expect to see something close to twice that for black Americans.”
  • For Yolanda Murray of Detroit, Michigan, not having savings meant weeks of panic trying to figure out how she was going to pay the bills that came on 1 April after she was furloughed from her job at a hotel.
  • last hired, first fired” phenomenon dramatically affects black Americans more than any other group in the US due to the country’s history of racism and segregation of black Americans in the work sector.
  • Working in these fields leads to lower wages – black Americans have the lowest median wage of any racial group in the US – and the jobs are often seen as the most expendable during an economic downturn.
  • Even with a low unemployment rate, wage growth for low-wage workers, especially for black workers, has been slow. Black Americans have seen the slowest wage growth compared with other groups of Americans, reaching a growth rate that was four times slower at certain wage distribution levels, according to a 2018 Economic Policy Institute report.
  • The reason why African Americans bear the brunt of downturns more is that when firing decisions start to occur the least educated and those with the least experience tend to be let go first. There is also continued discrimination in the workplace,” Rodgers said.
  • t’s like how am I going to maintain all of this?” Murray said. Weeks after she filed her application for unemployment insurance, payments started coming in and Murray was able to pay her bills again.
  • Murray and her unionized co-workers spent 28 days striking for higher wages and better healthcare. At the time, workers at the hotel had not had wage rises since before the last recession, and healthcare costs were so expensive that Murray could only afford to cover herself, leaving her two children out of her plan.
  • Trump’s repeated claims that he has been the best president for African Americans was repeatedly pegged to falling unemployment numbers. But those numbers only tell a partial story, as work by Rodgers and others has shown. Black families are especially vulnerable to economic downturns because they lack the savings that can act as a buffer against unexpected layoffs or lost wages. And during the last recovery they lost ground against their white peers.
  • compared with 9%, respectively. And the black homeownership rate is the lowest of any racial group in the US and has consistently been about 30% lower than the white homeownership rate over the years, even as the economy was getting stronger.
  • “Wealth allows you to respond to that unexpected health emergency, that broken hole in the tire you have to replace. It also allows you to buy a home, put your kids through school,” said Danyelle Solomon, vice-president of the race and ethnicity program at the Center for American Progress.
  • Experts agree that being poor has costly effects on a person’s health: for adults living in extreme poverty, being poor can cost up to 15 years of life expectancy.
  • ave seen higher death rates due to Covid-19 compared with any other group in the US. Black Americans made up 25% of deaths from Covid-19 in the US though they make up a little under 13% of the US population.
  • “National emergencies, pandemics, epidemics, what they do is they spotlight inequality,” Solomon said. “What we see in Covid-19 is no different. It’s highlighting racial disparities at every single level that have been with our society for a very long time.”
andrespardo

Black people four times more likely to die from Covid-19, ONS finds | Society | The Gua... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...to-die-from-covid-19-ons-finds

coronavirus crisis corona economics race

shared by andrespardo on 07 May 20 - No Cached
  • Black people four times more likely to die from Covid-19, ONS finds
  • Black people are more than four times more likely to die from Covid-19 than white people, according to stark official figures exposing a dramatic divergence in the impact of the coronavirus pandemic in England and Wales. The Office of National Statistics found that the difference in the virus’s impact was caused not only by pre-existing differences in communities’ wealth, health, education and living arrangements.
  • after other pre-existing factors had been accounted for, and females from those ethnic groups were 1.6 times more likely to die from the virus than their white counterparts.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The risk of Covid-19 death for people from Chinese and mixed ethnic groups was found to be similar to that for white people.
  • Guardian research last month confirmed suspicions that minority groups faced the greatest risk from the coronavirus and showed that areas with high ethnic minority populations in England and Wales tended to have higher mortality rates in the pandemic.
  • “We cannot ignore how important racial discrimination and racial inequalities, for example, in housing, are, even among poorer socio-economic groups,” she said. “These factors are important but are not taken into account in most statistical modelling of Covid-19 risk factors.”
  • These groups are more likely to work in frontline roles in the NHS in England: nearly 21% of staff are from ethnic minorities, compared with about 14% of the population of England and Wales. Black, Bangladeshi and Pakistani populations have been shown to face higher levels of unemployment and child poverty than white groups.
  • The authors called for further research on the contribution of occupational risk and whether people from BAME backgrounds were placed at increased risk of exposure and infection.
  • To try to understand how much of the difference in Covid-19 morbidity was to do purely with ethnicity, the statisticians adjusted for age as well as region, rural and urban classification, area deprivation, household composition, socio-economic position, highest qualification held, household tenure, and health or disability as recorded in the 2011 census.
  • After all these factors were accounted for, Indian men and women were less likely than people from Bangladeshi and Pakistani background to die from Covid-19, but were still 1.3 times and 1.4 times more vulnerable than white people.
  • The ONS also checked to see if, within ethnic groups, socio-economic class made a difference. They found that the differences in risk of Covid-19-related death across ethnic groups were of similar magnitudes within all three socio-economic classes.
  • Some groups may be over-represented in public-facing occupations and could be more likely to be infected by Covid-19 . About 12.8% of workers from Bangladeshi and Pakistani backgrounds work in public-facing transport jobs such as bus, coach and taxi driving, compared with 3.5% of white people. The ONS said it plans to conduct further work to identify occupations that are particularly at risk.
  • Like the ONS data, the study found that people of black and Asian backgrounds were at higher risk of death, and it ruled out the idea that this was largely due to higher rates of underlying medical problems in these groups.
  • “It doesn’t have to be like this. As a society that prides itself on justice and compassion, we can and must do better.”
  • The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, found that people from deprived social backgrounds were also at a higher risk, and again this finding could not be explained by other risk factors.
  • The research accounts for health problems reported by people who filled in the 2011 census, but Hanif said differences in the extent of other underlying diseases in different ethnic groups in Britain – so-called co-morbidities – which have not been accounted for by the ONS, may be significant. For example, in the UK people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent are
  • “We have commissioned Public Health England to better understand the different factors, such as ethnicity, obesity and geographical location that may influence the effects of the virus.”
krystalxu

Gender Equality and Women's Development in China - 0 views

www.china-un.ch/...t210715.htm

culture Gender Equality Women China policy

shared by krystalxu on 23 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Of its total population of 1.3 billion, women account for about half.
  • women are being given more guarantees of enjoyment of equal rights and opportunities with men and the development of women is being given unprecedented opportunities.
  • The state has continuously intensified its efforts in the formulation, revision and enforcement of relevant laws and regulations to protect the legitimate rights and interests of women in earnest.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The new document outlines 34 major goals and 100 policies and measures in six fields: women and the economy; women's participation in decision-making and administration; women and education; women and health; women and the law; and women and the environment.
  • Giving full play to women's role in the rural economy. China is basically an agricultural country, and women account for more than 60 percent of the rural labor force and are a major force in farming activities.
  • Over the past decade, materials on gender statistics have been compiled and published by the state departments of statistics.
  • By the end of 2004, the number of both urban and rural women workers reached 337 million nationwide, accounting for 44.8 percent of the total employed;
  • Their expenditures are covered in the financial budgets of the governments at the corresponding level.
  • reducing the extent of poverty among and the number of poor women, and calls for more support for poverty-stricken women in the country's western development strategy,
  • the "Poverty-Reduction Action for Women"
  • the proportions of full-time women teachers in secondary vocational schools and institutions of higher learning was 46.5 percent and 42.5 percent, respectively.
  • From 2001 to 2004, the central government earmarked 9.7 billion yuan to solve the problem of drinking water for rural residents, providing safe drinking water for an average of 6.9 million rural women a year.
  • The upgrading of public toilets and sewage facilities has eased the heavy burden of many rural women to carry water, and reduced health hazards for them and their family members, thus effectively improving their living and development conditions.
  • Some courts have established specialized tribunals to accept and adjudicate civil cases involving the protection of women's rights and interests,
malonema1

Anger over Donald Trump's UK crime tweet - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...uk-politics-41695667

trump US UK

shared by malonema1 on 21 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump has been accused of fuelling hate crime with a tweet erroneously linking a rise in the UK crime rate to "radical Islamic terror".He said crime in the UK had risen by 13% amid the "spread" of Islamist terror - despite the figure referring to all crimes, not just terrorism.
  • US media outlets have speculated whether Mr Trump's tweet followed a TV report on One America News Network, a conservative TV channel, which aired the statistics on Friday morning.
  • Donald Trump is half right. Crime has gone up by 13% - but not in the UK. The increase announced yesterday covered England and Wales whereas Scotland and Northern Ireland publish their data separately.But overlooking that mistake, what about the phrase that appears to connect the increase to the "spread of radical Islamic terror"?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • He had earlier lashed out at Sadiq Khan, tweeting that the London mayor had offered a "pathetic excuse" to Londoners after the London Bridge terror attack by telling people not to be alarmed.The Office for National Statistics said it would not comment on Mr Trump's tweet, but added that the survey relates to all crimes in England and Wales between 2016 and 2017.
ethanshilling

Tornadoes and Violent Storms Hit Southeast, Leaving at Least Five Dead - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tornadoes-southeast.html

US climate storms

shared by ethanshilling on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • At least five people died and homes and businesses were leveled in Alabama as a result of powerful storms and tornadoes moving across the Southeast on Thursday.
  • The National Weather Service reported multiple tornadoes in Alabama, including one that likely traveled over 100 miles, from near Birmingham to the northeastern corner of the state.
  • In Florence, Ala., a police officer was struck by lightning during the height of the afternoon storm, said Chief Mike Holt. The officer suffered burns but survived.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • More than 45,000 properties across several states had lost electricity by evening, according to PowerOutage.us.
  • The National Weather Service issued tornado warnings in Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, urging residents facing the most imminent danger to “TAKE COVER NOW!”
  • “Our priority at the moment is identifying those citizens in need of emergency medical attention,” John Samaniego, the sheriff in Shelby County, said in a statement, adding that there had been “significant tornado damage,” including residences that had been “completely destroyed.”
  • In Birmingham, James Spann, an ABC33/40 meteorologist, was reporting on the storms when a tornado struck his own home.
  • “It’s not a good situation,” Mr. Spann said when he returned. “The reason I had to step out —we’ve had major damage at my house. My wife is OK, but the tornado came right through there.”
  • Officials warned residents to prepare as schools and government offices closed early. “Stay home, stay safe, stay informed,” Andy Berke, the mayor of Chattanooga, Tenn., said on Twitter.
  • The destructive weather returned a week after some of the same areas were hit by an outbreak of powerful storms that swept through Mississippi and Alabama before moving on to Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia.
  • In 2020, the United States saw almost 1,000 tornadoes and 76 tornado deaths, according to preliminary counts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
  • Officials have also warned residents to have an emergency supply kit on hand, complete with items like a first aid kit, nonperishable food, water and batteries.
  • In Florence, Ala., meanwhile, Chief Holt marveled at the unlikely chance that his officer would be hit by lightning and his relatively good fortune at surviving. “He’s doing really well for someone who got struck by lightning,” Mr. Holt said.
‹ Previous 21 - 40 of 401 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page