Tag: united states

America's Data Book: Census Abstract 2011

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An excellent summary of 2011 Census Statistical abstract was given by NYTimes at

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/07/us/CENSUS.html?hp

Like more white people now enjoy jazz than black people now (presumably who have got rap music), but not details enough on ahem country music

The Data book is at http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/

What is the Statistical Abstract?

The Statistical Abstract of the United States, published since 1878, is the authoritative and comprehensive summary of statistics on the social, political, and economic organization of the United States.

Use the Abstract as a convenient volume for statistical reference, and as a guide to sources of more information both in print and on the Web.

Sources of data include the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis, and many other Federal agencies and private organizations.

Tables of Interest

1060 – Shopping Centers–Number and Gross Leasable Area [Excel 31K] | [PDF 59K]

1170 – Flow of Funds Accounts-Liabilities of Households and Nonprofit Organizations [Excel 41K] | [PDF 66K]

1172 – Amount of Debt Held by Families-Percent Distribution [Excel 29K] | [PDF 66K]

1173 – Ratios of Debt Payments to Family Income [Excel 857K] | [PDF 64K]

327 – Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted [Excel 34k] | [PDF 468k]

From the last table you can see , while the number of officers killed or feloniously killed decreased by 20% in past five years, the number of officers assaulted by firearms grew by 20% in the same period.

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Top Cartoonists:Updated

Here is a list of cartoonists I follow- I sometimes think they make more sense than all the news media combined.

1) Mike Luckovich He is a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist for AJC at http://blogs.ajc.com/mike-luckovich/

I love his political satire-sometimes not his politics- though he is a liberal (surprisingly most people from creative arts tend to be liberal- guess because they support and need welfare more, 🙂 ) Since I am in India- I call myself a conservative (when filing taxes) or liberal (when drinking er tea)

2) Hugh Mcleod- of Gaping Void is very different from Mike above, in the way an abstract painter would be from a classical

artist. I like his satire on internet, technology and personal favorite – social media consultants. Hugh casts a critical eye on the world of tech and is an immensely successful artist- probably the Andy Warhol of this genre in a generation.

3) Doug Savage of Savage Chickens http://www.savagechickens.com/ has a great series of funny cartoons based on chickens drawn on Post it notes. While his drawing is less abstract than Hugh’s above, he sometimes touches an irreverent note more like Hugh than anyone else.

4) Professor Jorge Cham of Phd Comics http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php is probably the most read comic in grad school  – and probably the only cartoonist with a Phd I know of.

5) Scott Adams of Dilbert http://www.dilbert.com/ is probably the first “non kid stuff” cartoonist I started reading-in fact I once wrote to him asking for advice on my poetry to his credit- he replied with a single ” Best of Luck email”

They named our email server in Lucknow, UP, India for him (in my business school at http://iiml.ac.in ) Probably the best of corporate toon humor. Maybe they should make the Dilbert movie yet.

6) Randall Munroe of xkcd.com

XKCD is geek cartooning at its best.

For catching up with the best toons in a week, the best is Time.com ‘s weekly list at http://www.time.com/time/cartoonsoftheweek

It is the best collection of political cartoons.

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Test Drive a Google Chrome Notebook: Last Two Days left

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Chrome

Test drive a Chrome notebook.

We have a limited number of Chrome notebooks to distribute, and we need to ensure that they find good homes. That’s where you come in. Everything is still very much a work in progress, and it’s users, like you, that often give us our best ideas about what feels clunky or what’s missing. So if you live in the United States, are at least 18 years old, and would like to be considered for our small Pilot program, please fill this out. It should take about 15 minutes. We’ll review the requests that come in and contact you if you’ve been selected.

This application will be open until 11:59:59 PM PST on December 21, 2010.

What type of user are you?

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/cr48advanced/

Business
Education
Non-Profit
Developer
Individual
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Google Books Ngram Viewer

Here is a terrific data visualization from Google based on their digitized books collection. How does it work, basically you can test the frequency of various words across time periods from 1700s to 2010.

Like the frequency and intensity of kung fu vs yoga, or pizza versus hot dog. The basic datasets scans millions /billions of words.

Here is my yoga vs kung fu vs judo graph.

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/info

What’s all this do?

When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., “British English”, “English Fiction”, “French”) over the selected years. Let’s look at a sample graph:

This shows trends in three ngrams from 1950 to 2000: “nursery school” (a 2-gram or bigram), “kindergarten” (a 1-gram or unigram), and “child care” (another bigram). What the y-axis shows is this: of all the bigrams contained in our sample of books written in English and published in the United States, what percentage of them are “nursery school” or “child care”? Of all the unigrams, what percentage of them are “kindergarten”? Here, you can see that use of the phrase “child care” started to rise in the late 1960s, overtaking “nursery school” around 1970 and then “kindergarten” around 1973. It peaked shortly after 1990 and has been falling steadily since.

(Interestingly, the results are noticeably different when the corpus is switched to British English.)

Corpora

Below are descriptions of the corpora that can be searched with the Google Books Ngram Viewer. All of these corpora were generated in July 2009; we will update these corpora as our book scanning continues, and the updated versions will have distinct persistent identifiers.

Informal corpus name Persistent identifier Description
American English googlebooks-eng-us-all-20090715 Same filtering as the English corpus but further restricted to books published in the United States.
British English googlebooks-eng-gb-all-20090715 Same filtering as the English corpus but further restricted to books published in Great Britain.
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Chinese Fortune Cookies

An out-ward or right-ward shift in supply redu...
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Source-http://www.usnews.com/usnews/images/cartoons/050110_editorial.jpg

In a world of experts-some questions to ask about China’s foreign policy , trade and military convergence

1) How can an increasingly rich 1.2 billion people accept a restricted internet, one child policies, and severe political restrictions/

2) How long can the Chinese respect for elders and ancestors be translated to a respect for the communist government? How do you measure the level of satisfaction?

3) Can ambitious Chinese Mandarins be motivated by career motives to act tougher than the country’s national interest demands?

4) Rare earth demand and supply curves? Clean energy investments versus climate change commitments graph?

5)Military- Metrics like Chinese Air Force flying hours per pilot, or submarine activity per annum?

As the Chinese supposedly said- May you live in interesting times

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China -United States -The Third Opium War

U.S.troops in China during the Boxer Rebellion...
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A brief glance through http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/tic/Documents/mfh.txt

shows that while US added 600 billion of debt during the past one year, the Chinese actually reduced their exposure by 50 billion Dollars.

so who has been financing the debt for the US for the past one year- It is Japan- eager to keep its currency down and United Kingdom which has pumped in an extra 300 billion of T Bills.

See the whole table at official link above or at goo.gl/qMugp

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China still remembers the Opium Wars in which the then ruling Anglo Saxon superpower used naval superiority to enforce trade and eventual political dependency. Is China unsure of the United States brotherly nice  intentions? They certainly seem to be putting their money that way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

Britain forced the Chinese government into signing theTreaty of Nanking and the Treaty of Tianjin, also known as the Unequal Treaties, which included provisions for the opening of additional ports to unrestricted foreign trade, for fixed tariffs; for the recognition of both countries as equal in correspondence; and for the cession of Hong Kong to Britain. The British also gained extraterritorial rights. Several countries followed Britain and sought similar agreements with China. Many Chinese found these agreements humiliating and these sentiments contributed to the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), and the downfall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, putting an end to dynastic China.

———————————————————————————————-

The Koreans can always be depended on provide the first shot in any conflict- and though Anglo-US-Chinese conflict would be expensive- I guess as long as the cost of outstanding debt with China is less than cost of a brief -techno-war , we would see interesting games in this neighborhood. Note China restricts major trade with United States particularly in software, internet services (like Web Advertising, Facebook, Twitter ) and represents a lucrative market for big pharma (especially in psychiatric drugs) and big tech once it reforms its intellectual property rights. Software would be the opium of the 21st Century- if Chinese resist the Treasury Bills as their poppy flowers. The widespread Western media coverage of school kids murders by pyschopaths is also a trade tactic to encourage flow of more US made medicine in the Chinese market.

It would also help create an economic revival in the United States to exaggerate the Chinese threat (remember Sputnik) and build up its own cyber spending. Any military or cyber humiliation for the ruling party in China can help create a political vacuum for more malleable and agreeable alternatives to emerge.

(to be continued)

 

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Test drive a Chrome notebook.

The United States
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Wanna test out the new Chrome OS.

Go to https://services.google.com/fb/forms/cr48basic/

and fill the form

Chrome

Test drive a Chrome notebook.

We have a limited number of Chrome notebooks to distribute, and we need to ensure that they find good homes. That’s where you come in. Everything is still very much a work in progress, and it’s users, like you, that often give us our best ideas about what feels clunky or what’s missing. So if you live in the United States, are at least 18 years old, and would like to be considered for our small Pilot program, please fill this out. We’ll review the requests that come in and contact you if you’ve been selected.

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/cr48basic/

 

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