international
esiegel | June 8, 2012"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…
bioephemera | June 10, 2009One 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…
edyong | March 2, 2009I 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…
esiegel | April 22, 2008As 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…
tlambert | October 22, 2002Joyce Lee Malcolm's article in Reason online ishere
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 reported…
tlambert | August 31, 2002Eugene 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),…
tlambert | October 8, 2001Mary 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…
tlambert | April 18, 1999Dan 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…
tlambert | November 19, 1998Gun 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…
tlambert | December 18, 1997" 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…
tlambert | April 16, 1997Paul 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.…
tlambert | March 9, 1997Scott 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 lookhere
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. Fromhere
you find 2206 of these in the Netherlands. 90% of these were…
tlambert | September 29, 1996Peter 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…
tlambert | August 3, 1996Jim 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…
tlambert | June 12, 1996Pim 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…
tlambert | November 29, 1995You 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…
tlambert | November 27, 1995D. 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…
tlambert | November 22, 1995Dan 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…
tlambert | June 29, 1994hollombe 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.
tlambert | April 24, 1994hambidge 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…