Category: Data Source

Extending the analysis to 1999, we see that the percentage of the world’s population who are native speakers of English actually declined from 9.8 to 7.8 percent.  The percentage of native speakers of the world’s leading language, Mandarin, also declined slightly, from 15.6 to 15.2 percent…The language groups that have increased dramatically as a percentage of the world population are Arabic and Bengali, which each accounted for 2.7 percent of the world’s speakers in 1958, but rose to 3.5 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively, in 1992.  Hindi speakers rose from 5.2 to 6.4 percent, and Spanish speakers from 5.0 to 6.1 percent.  English as a first language has fallen from its mid-century position of second place to fourth as the millennium ended.

That is from William H. Marling’s How "American" is Globalization?  This wide-ranging book is the definitive current source on which cultures are gaining and losing in respective cultural areas.  The bottom line of this book?  The world is not becoming Americanized.  Very highly recommended.

One of the great pleasures of being a professor in recent years is that I no longer have to go the library.  Trudging to the stacks, finding an article, and photocopying it are things of the past.  Almost everything is available online especially at the great JSTOR in the sky, a vast repository of electronic journals some dating back more than 100 years.

Not every university has access to JSTOR, however, and individual subscriptions are costly and limited in scope.  But Kevin Kelly points out that in many places you can get a digital library card which will get you access to many online databases. 

In most states, you can get a library card from a public library
outside of your county of residence — as long as you can prove state
residence (true for the San Francisco Public Library). Often you will
have to go the actual state library in person to pick up your card, but
once in hand, you can access the library from the web. Fanatical
researchers are known to have a wallet full of library cards from
numerous public library systems within their respective states. Some
states, Ohio and Michigan being two of the better known, have statewide
consortiums of private, corporate and public libraries, which allows
you access to the combined services and databases licensing power of
them all.

Suicide is now the biggest single killer among young Chinese people, the country’s first national suicide survey has shown.

Each year more than a quarter of a million people in China are taking their own lives, the study showed.

But the most significant finding was that, unlike almost everywhere else in the world, more women than men commit suicide.

Suicide now accounts for a third of all deaths among women in the countryside.

In the study, to be
published in British medical journal, The Lancet, US and Chinese
researchers discovered there was apparently a significantly lower rate
of mental illness among those committing suicide than would be the case
in the West.

Dr Michael Phillips, who
helped lead the study, told the BBC that while 90-95% of those taking
their own lives in the West suffered significant mental illness at the
time of attempting suicide, around a third of those in China did not.

…the biggest single reason why so many suicide attempts in China are successful is their method.

Nearly two-thirds of them are by consuming pesticides and powerful rat poisons which are extremely easy to buy in China.

Here is the story, courtesy of www.2blowhards.com.
 

My current locale Zurich, it turns out, based on this field experiment.  New York City of all places came in first, but I agree.  There is so much human capital in the city one is always tempted to speak to strangers, given the reasonably high chance you will hear something magnificent in return.  Third and fourth were Toronto and Berlin.  In Europe Moscow and Bucharest were the least polite cities.  Bombay fared worst of all.

Read Austan Goolsbee in today’s New York Times.  Excerpt:

It seems that a child with talent can succeed no matter what the
parents’ skills are, as has been true for centuries in this country. 
But parents whose English is poor have a big negative impact on the
below-average children.

"Time."  Here is the list of the Top 25.

“When altruism is expensive, women are kinder, when it is cheap, men are more altruistic.”

There is more to be had here.

You might think this post is "libertarian cackling with glee," but in fact I was surprised to see this.  The problem is also expected to get worse, read the whole thing.

Higher hamburger prices may reduce the probability and frequency of use of marijuana and the frequency of smoking among drivers.

Well, you didn’t think the cross-elasticities were zero, did you?  Here is the paper.

One might also call this "Airline Fact of the Day":

My friend Peter Thompson did some research on this. At least going back to 1970, which by my estimation encompasses over 150 million commercial airline flights, there has not been a single water landing! (Some planes explode and fall into the water, but he couldn’t find anything resembling a water landing where any of those instructions might help you.) So perhaps 15 billion customer trips have heard that 10-15 second set of instructions without it ever being useful to anyone.

That is from Steve Levitt.  Here is the official site of Unlikely.  Here are unlikely stories.

Addendum: Do read the comments, the "fact" appears to be wrong…

One third of the value of Indian fruits and vegetables ends up destroyed or spoiled on the way to market, mostly because of bad infrastructure, most of all bad roads.

That is from the International Herald Tribune, May 27 2006.