Category Archives: General Chaos

Administrivia, General Chaos

I’ll take Uruguay

A frequent criticism of the statistics used by the gun control lobby and folks like Michael Moore use is that the huge disparity in gun deaths in the US vs the rest of the world doesn't take other violence in those countries into account, and doesn't weight the numbers against population. So there, nyah nyah nyah.

Well, here are those numbers, thanks to School of Social Science at UC Irvine's Peace Monitor program.

And guess what? The US still sucks when it comes to violence. You're less likely to get whacked in Uruguay than here.

Americans are more than twice as likely (at 7.9 violent deaths per 100,000 people) to be killed in an act of violence as, say, Canadians (who get offed violently at a rate of 2.7 per 100k), and are still way ahead of Japan (2.0) and England and Wales (which, at 4.2, is even more dangerous than Northern Ireland which rates a 3.4). Even Cuba, with 7.6 offings per 100k, is marginally safer.

But there's a place where violence is ten times as bad as it is here–where 77.4 people per 100k come to a bloody end. And that place is…the Russian Federation. Running a distant second is the Phillipines, which has a violent death rate of 58.1 per 100k. (Israel, by comparison, ranks at 8.3 per 100k–placing it just ahead of Poland and the US).

Wanna live someplace safe? Try Norway, with 1.2 violent deaths per 100k population.

Now, it's concievable that there are places that are even worse than Russia–these numbers are based on data from the World Health Organization mortality database, which only covers 66 countries thoroughly.

But somehow, having just a tenth of the violence of Russia–which has a civil war going on with Chechnya–strikes me as faint praise for American civility.
The only European countries with higher violent death rates than the US are Poland, Portugal (with 15.6/100k! Yikes!), the Republic of Moldova and the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia).

By the way, in 2000, my home town of Baltimore had a murder rate of 40.3 per 100,000, which would place it in the #4 position on the world chart if taken separately from the rest of the US–right behind Venezuela.

Now, just because I'm pointing this out doesn't mean I'm for gun control (well, not in the conventional sense, at least). I think the problem is rooted elsewhere… but that's another post.

Standard
buzzword compliance, General Chaos

Stick that in your pipe and syndicate it

My old colleague Steve Gillmor apparently got a lot of grief about his RSS obsession, thanks to a posting by the Scobleizer (there's a reason he's got that knickname, after all). Without context, Steve's RSS boosterism may seem to border on the bizarre to some. But it's easy to understand once you put all the other pieces together.

For those of you who haven't been fully indoctrinated yet, RSS (which, depending on which faction of the XML wars you belong to, stands for Really Simple Syndication or RDF Site Summary) is an XML format most commonly used to “syndicate” content (usually web content, as in news “feeds” or weblog entries)–as part of a paid or free subscription to a specific content source. RSS “feeds” are pulled in by a piece of software and rendered for a user to read directly (as with RSS newsreaders like AmphetaDesk and Ranchero's NetNewsWire, and blogging software like Radio), or processed to be posted to a web page.

At least, that's what they're used for now. Because of the way they work, RSS feeds could concievably be the delivery vehicle for any number of things. Radio already uses them to deliver media downloads–subscribe to, for instance, Adam Curry's weblog feed, and you'll get an occasional video “enclosure” download to your hard drive.

In fact, RSS is potentially a great way to deliver web services to user's desktops as well. What if they were used as the subscription vehicle for web services–to, say, syndicate an interface to a movie schedule database, or a context-sensitive connection to an online bookseller?

There's already a similar implementation of a “channel” based content delivery system that's widely distributed: Sherlock in Mac OS X 10.2 uses “channels” to deliver web services to the desktop. Sherlock uses an Apple-specific API for its web services that governs how they're presented on the client–but what if that information were just provided in the description tag for an RSS feed item, and the link was to the backend web service instead of Jow Blow's latest weblog entry?

There are already some web services being delivered as RSS. An early example of this is Google Alert (which uses the Google Web APIs to generate an RSS feed of a specific Google search, updating it daily); Radio allows users to do something similar with its “Googlebox” code.

Amazon already has an “associate” program that uses links from other people's websites–but what if it delivered a web service-based front end, through an RSS feed?

Or, what if Microsoft issued all of its security patches via an RSS feed that was consumed by the OS itself at start-up?

Standard