Camil Stoenescu's blog

China execută mai mulți oameni decât restul lumii la un loc, conform ultimului raport al Amnesty International. Lucru firesc, dacă ne gândim că inclusiv traficul de droguri e pasibil de pedeapsa capitală în Republica Populară Chineză. În toată această vreme, Statele Unite – cea mai cunoscută țară din acest punct de vedere – nu se poate mândri „decât” cu 52 de execuții în 2009, număr ce pălește în fața celor peste 388 ale Iranului, de exemplu.

Iar Amnesty International le plânge de milă, desigur, în numele progresului și al drepturilor omului șamd:

Amnesty International has been campaigning for the total abolition of the death penalty since 1977. The organization believes that the death penalty violates the right to life and is the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. It opposes the death penalty in all cases without exception regardless of the nature of the crime, the characteristics of the offender, or the method used by the state to kill the prisoner.

Amnesty International believes that the death penalty legitimizes an irreversible act of violence by the state. Research demonstrates that the death penalty is often applied in a discriminatory manner, being used disproportionately against the poor, minorities and members of racial, ethnic and religious communities. The death penalty is often imposed after a grossly unfair trial. But even when trials respect international standards of fairness, the risk of executing the innocent can never be fully eliminated – the death penalty will inevitably claim innocent victims, as has been persistently demonstrated.

While the death penalty runs the risk of irrevocable error, it has not been proven to have any special deterrent effect. It denies the possibility of rehabilitation. It promotes simplistic responses to complex human problems, rather than pursuing constructive solutions. It consumes resources that could be better used to work against violent crime and assist those affected by it. It is a symptom of a culture of violence, not a solution to it. It is an affront to human dignity.

The world witnessed further progress towards ending judicial killings by states in 2009. For the first time since Amnesty International started keeping records, not a single execution was carried out in all of Europe, while important steps were taken to turn the United Nations General Assembly resolutions calling for a worldwide moratorium on executions into reality. 
Two more countries, Burundi and Togo, abolished the death penalty in 2009, bringing the number of countries that have removed capital punishment entirely from their laws to 95. The world is in reach of 100 countries declaring their refusal to put people to death. 
In the Americas, the United States of America (USA) was the only nation to carry out executions in 2009. 
In sub-Saharan Africa only two countries executed prisoners: Botswana and Sudan. 
In Asia, there were no executions in Afghanistan, Indonesia, Mongolia and Pakistan in 2009, the first execution-free year in those countries in recent times.

These successes follow decisions by the UN General Assembly in 2007 and 2008 to call for a global moratorium on executions as a first step to total abolition. Amnesty International hopes and believes that the UN General Assembly resolutions – the first of their kind – will continue to be a major influence in persuading countries to abandon their use of capital punishment. A similar resolution will be considered at the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly in late 2010. 
But even as world opinion and practice shift inexorably towards abolition, the extensive and politicized use of the death penalty continues in countries including China, Iran and Sudan. In 2009, as in previous years, the majority of the world’s executions occurred in two regions: Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. 
The continuing executions of juvenile offenders – those under 18 years of age at the time of the crime – continued in two countries: Iran and Saudi Arabia. These executions were in violation of international law.
Secrecy surrounds the use of the death penalty in countries such as China, Belarus, Iran, Mongolia, North Korea and Viet Nam. Such secrecy is indefensible. If capital punishment is a legitimate act of government as these nations claim, there is no reason for its use to be hidden from the public and international scrutiny.[…]

De aici.

Un studiu actual confirmă un adevăr vechi de când lumea: oamenii se asociază conform preferințelor și afinităților, evitând relațiile și interacțiunile problematice:

A new study analysing interactions between players in a virtual universe game has for the first time provided large-scale evidence to prove an 80 year old psychological theory called Structural Balance Theory. The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that individuals tend to avoid stress-causing relationships when they develop a society, resulting in more stable social networks.

The study, carried out at Imperial College London, the Medical University of Vienna and the Santa Fe Institute, analyses relationships between 300,000 players in an online game called Pardus. In this open-ended game, players act as spacecraft exploring a virtual universe, where they can make friends and enemies, and communicate, trade and fight with one another.

Scientists currently study data from people’s electronic interactions, such as emails, mobile phones and online retail behaviour, to improve our understanding of human societies. Online games such as Pardus produce vast amounts of data that scientists can also use to study interactions between players, applying their findings to understanding the way that people interact in society.

Structural Balance Theory is an 80 year old psychological theory that suggests some networks of relationships are more stable than others in a society. Specifically, the theory deals with positive and negative links between three individuals, where ‘the friend of my enemy is my enemy’ is more stable (and therefore more common) than ‘the friend of my friend is my enemy’.

Din Science Daily.

Human intelligence is puzzling. It is higher, on average, in some places than in others. And it seems to have been rising in recent decades. Why these two things should be true is controversial. This week, though, a group of researchers at the University of New Mexico propose the same explanation for both: the effect of infectious disease. If they are right, it suggests that the control of such diseases is crucial to a country’s development in a way that had not been appreciated before. Places that harbour a lot of parasites and pathogens not only suffer the debilitating effects of disease on their workforces, but also have their human capital eroded, child by child, from birth.

Christopher Eppig and his colleagues make their suggestion in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. They note that the brains of newly born children require 87% of those children’s metabolic energy. In five-year-olds the figure is still 44% and even in adults the brain—a mere 2% of the body’s weight—consumes about a quarter of the body’s energy. Any competition for this energy is likely to damage the brain’s development, and parasites and pathogens compete for it in several ways. Some feed on the host’s tissue directly, or hijack its molecular machinery to reproduce. Some, particularly those that live in the gut, stop their host absorbing food. And all provoke the host’s immune system into activity, which diverts resources from other things.[…]

De aici.

Un senator american democrat scrie, în Wall Street Journal, despre ipocrizia actualei politici  antidiscriminare din Statele Unite.

Forty years ago, as the United States experienced the civil rights movement, the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America. After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. The time has come to cease the false arguments and allow every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future.

I have dedicated my political career to bringing fairness to America’s economic system and to our work force, regardless of what people look like or where they may worship. Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.

In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived.

Pentru că în Statele Unite dacă ești alb poți fi discriminat fără probleme – la ocuparea unui loc în facultate sau angajare – conform unei logici istorice absurde: „strămoșii tăi albi i-au asuprit pe strămoșii afro-americanilor actuali, acum 100-150 de ani”…

Take "Humpty Dumpty sat on a…" Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say "sat" rather than "sit." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can’t) change the verb to mark tense.

In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.

In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you’d use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you’d use a different form.

Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?

De aici.

Numărul de sinucideri la 100 000 de locuitori, conform statisticilor Organizației Mondiale a Sănătății:

În caz că este cineva curios de unde provine Seasons in the sun.

Patricieni și plebei…

Will large numbers of today’s children grow up to become servants and nannies in the homes of the digital bourgeoisie? There is good reason to believe that the answer is yes.

The most pressing issue of the day remains sky-high unemployment. There is, however, almost no consensus about how to think about the the depth of the problems facing the U.S. labor market. Many believe that the staggering unemployment rate is purely cyclical. Karl Smith, an economist at the UNC School of Government, has written a post on "the myth of structural unemployment," arguing that "the structure of the American economy hasn’t changed that much in the last 24 months.

Din Forbes.