international

"Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen." -Larry Niven Here on the solid ground of the Earth, the Sun and Moon rise and set on a daily basis. During the hours where the Sun is invisible, blocked by the solid Earth, the stars twirl overhead in the great canopy of the night sky. Image credit: Chris Luckhardt at flickr. In the northern hemisphere, they appear to rotate around the North Star, while in the southern hemisphere, the stars appear to rotate about the South Celestial Pole. The longer you observe -- or for photography, the longer you…

One of the challenges we faced with our new blogosphere initiative, Silence is the Enemy, was how to mobilize people to do something about the plight of rape victims. It's not that people don't have empathy for rape victims; it's that the experience of living in a war-torn nation where rape and murder are routine facts of life is so foreign and horrifying to us, we tend to tune it out. Part of the way to deal with this is to give people a clear mission - something simple they can do; in our case, donating to Doctors without Borders (as I am for the month of June), or writing to Congress, or…

I live in London. According to Google Analytics, 96% of this blog's readers make their homes in a different city and 91% live in another country altogether. The fact that most of you are reading this post at all is a symptom of the globalised state of the 21st century. Through telecommunications, the Internet, free trade, air travel and more, the world's population is becoming increasingly connected and dependent on one another. And as this happens, the problems that face us as a species are becoming ever more apparent, from our relentless overuse of natural resources to the threat of…

As you may have noticed from yesterday's unusual post, today is Earth Day! I thought I'd share with you some of my favorite pictures from space of it, including the famous photograph from Apollo 8 known as Earthrise: This combination shot made from NASA’s Terra satellite and NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite: The known satellites at least 0.1 meters in size in orbit around Earth (there are ~11,000 of them as of April 2005, and another 100,000 between 1 cm and 10 cm in size): Looking at the Earth and the docked Space Shuttle from the International Space Station: And…

Joyce Lee Malcolm's article in Reason online is here In that article she claims that "And in the four years from 1997 to 2001, the rate of violent crime [in England] more than doubled." and asserts that this increase was caused by British gun control. It took me less than five minutes to find the official English crime statistics. Going to the section on violent crime I find the following: "Estimates from the BCS reveal large and consistent falls in violent crime overall since 1995." "Longer-term trends in violence overall continue to show significant declines. Comparison of results…

Eugene Volokh writes: Martin Killias's "International Correlations Between Gun Ownership and Rates of Homicide and Suicide," 148 Can. Med. Assoc. J. 1721, 1723-24 (1993), purported to show that "the proportions and the rates of homicide and suicide committed with a gun as well as the overall rates committed by any means were related to the rate of household gun ownership." Don Kates has just pointed out that a recent Killias work, Martin Killias, John van Kesteren & Martin Rindlisbacher, "Guns, Violent Crime, and Suicide in 21 Countries," 43 Canadian J. of Criminology 429 (2001),…

Mary Rosh writes: If you want a good study that doesn't cherry pick data the way Lambert likes to do, The cherry-picking is Shawn's. How come you're not objecting to his Vermont vs DC comparison? read the study by Jeff Miron entitled "Violence, Guns, and Drugs: A Cross-Country Analysis" Miron's work is the most comprehensive that I know of that tries to account for different factors across countries and he finds evidence that gun control is either significantly positively or insignificantly positively related to more crime. I would love to see Lambert try to explain away these results or…

Dan Z wrote: Yeah, that's really odd. According to figures published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, in 1994, Northern Ireland had an adjusted homicide rate of 5.85 and Scotland was 2.24. It looks to me like the rate for Northern Ireland is greater What does "adjusted" mean here? RD Thompson writes: They removed all the political homicides. Wrong. Political homicides were included. "Adjusted" refers to controlling for demographic differences --- younger people are more likely to be murdered than older people, so if you want to see if a difference is homicide rates is…

Gun Control Advocates Purvey Deadly Myths Wall Street Journal, 11 Nov. 1998 By John R. Lott JR. The U.S. has a high murder rate because Americans own so many guns. There is no international evidence backing this up. The Swiss, New Zealanders and Finns all own guns as frequently as Americans, yet in 1995 Switzerland had a murder rate 40% lower than Germany's, and New Zealand had one lower than Australia's. Fin- land and Sweden have very different gun ownership rates, but very similar murder rates. Israel, with a higher gun ownership rate than the U.S., has a…

" THE 'PSYCHIC COST' OF HOLIDAY GIFT-GIVING" By Dr. Paul Gallant and David Kopel The approach of the holiday season brings a perennial problem: what to give the relative or good friend who already has a VCR? For many American gift-givers the answer has often been a high-quality firearm. Perhaps that long-admired hunting rifle, for him? Maybe a LadySmith revolver for her? "Don't do it --- you'll frighten your neighbors!" warn some latter-day Scrooges, citing an article "Firearms and Community Feelings of Safety," from the Journal on Criminal Law and Criminology. Polling information "provides…

Paul Blackman wrote: "Just a reminder that Pim's reliance upon Killias for showing a relationship between gun ownership and homicide is undermined by Kleck's critique of Killias for some deliberate distortions of data, inappropriate exclusions of some countries versus others, etc. Pim doesn't accept Kleck's refutation, and it seems pointless to recount it, but Kleck would find the data unimpressive." At the heart of Kleck's "refutation" is a statistical error that a first year undergraduate should not make. I am surprised that someone with Dr Blackman's undoubted skills did not notice.…

Scott Marshall writes: Comparison of Murder Rate per 100,000 in Capital Cities Amsterdam - 38 I don't think so. Amsterdam has a population of 713,000, so this is 270 murders. If you look here you will discover that in the Netherlands there were only 228 homicides committed in 1990. Needless to say, it is impossible for there to be more homicides in Amsterdam (5% of the population) than in the entire country. The figure you have quoted would seem to be for (attempted + committed) homicides. From here you find 2206 of these in the Netherlands. 90% of these…

Peter H. Proctor writes: If memory serves, roughly half of all murders in the US are committed by blacks ( usually against other blacks ), who represent about 14% of the US population. If memory serves, if you discount this one population, the murder rate in the US is below some European countries. This is counting Hispanics ( who have a murder rate roughly double that for other US whites ) with the White population. The US white homicide rate is about 5 per 100,000. The median homicide rate for Western European countries is about 1.2 per 100,000. (Source WHO Statistical Yearbook…

Jim Zoes was kind enough to send me the data on English homicide rates that he obtained from the Home Office. I've typed it in and included it at the end of this message. The numbers are certainly higher than those recorded in the WHO Statistical Yearbook. I'll try to find out why, but for now I think we should consider the Home Office data to be more reliable. Anyway, there is plenty of data to let us look at the question of whether English homicide rates were lower before the introduction of gun control than after. Fortunately, the answer turns out to be yes and no, so debates here about…

Pim Vanmeurs wrote: I think you'll find the Netherlands does a pretty good homicide rate. Indeed 1.2/100,000 total and 0.3/100,000 firearms related compared to US 7.6/100,000 total and 4.5/100,000 firearms related Netherlands 1.9% gun ownership USA 48% gun ownership rates source: Martin Killias international correlations between gun ownership and rates of homicide ad suicide, Can Med Ass Journal may 15, 1993. Kym Horsell writes: The Economist Handbook 1994 quotes the 5-y average for Netherlands at more than 10 per 100K (did seem a bit excessive). From "Trends in Crime and…

You can check Suter's Graph 16 "International Homicide Rates Comparisons" against the source he claims for this data (World Health Statistics 1989). You will discover that the homicide rates for many countries have been grossly overstated (for example, East Germany is given as 36.7 (over three times the US rate) instead of 0.7 (less than a tenth of the US rate). Other countries where Suter h greatly exaggerated the homicide rate include El Salvador, Mexico, Egypt, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Scotland. He has also given very high homicide rates for Zimbabwe and South Africa. These do not…

D. Deming wrote: For those interested in statistical criminology, there is an interesting article that appeared in the scholarly journal "The Mankind Quarterly", vol. 35, no. 4, summer, 1995. The article is titled "Ideology and Censorship in Behavior Genetics" by Glayde Whitney of Florida State University in Tallahassee. A most, umm, interesting journal. If I was looking for one word to describe it I think that word would be "racist". In one of the other issues I found an absolutely glowing and entirely uncritical review of JP Rushton's "Big dick = little brain" theory about the…

Dan Day writes: See Suter, Edgar, M.D., "Guns in the Medical Literature--A Failure of Peer Review", Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia, March, 1994. And note those 81 references at the end. This, Buddy, is what actual support for ones claims looks like. No, it's what a pack of lies looks like. There are dozens of falsehoods, and dozens of claims that are extremely dubious. Chris BeHanna writes: Please do take the time to point each and every one of them out, and why you think they are false. Go ahead---we'll wait. There are so many that I am going to have to put them out a few…

hollombe writes: Violent Crime Rate/100,000 Pop.: Year US' Rate Canada's Rate. 91 758 1099 Since "Violent Crime Rate" is defined differently in Canada and the US, the comparison is meaningless.

hambidge writes: There is no real correlation with total homicide. Why do you say 14 countries? Didn't they leave out N. Ireland, and cook the numbers for Switzerland? Since much disagreement surrounds the use of those two countries, do the analysis again with the remaining 12. One gets a correlation. OK, Spearman r is 0.64 (p=0.02). (Pearson is misleadingly high because of its sensitivity to outliers.) So the U.S. point is an outlier. Painfully obvious, wouldn't you say? Leave out the U.S., and the correlation disappears. Hardly. Spearman r is 0.53 if you do this. (And Person r is…