Since everybody has been talking about Google’s classification of Taiwan, it’s kind of fun to see how the CIA World Factbook contorts a little bit to list them properly.

Yes, under their dropdown menu of “Select country or region,” Taiwan gets the odd distinction of being placed at the end of the other-wise alphabetized list, along with the European Union.

Is this the fate of all political parties when they hold power for any length of time?

Oct 6, 2005 Taipei Times Editorial

After almost six years in power, the performance of the DPP administration has disappointed a number of pan-green diehards, with some gloomily wondering whether the DPP is losing its ideals and ability to improve itself. It has also alienated a large segment of the party’s grassroots supporters, the very people who had helped to elect the then 14-year-old DPP in 2000.

Some supporters are beginning to wonder whether the DPP has turned into the equivalent of the old Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime it used to fight against —a corrupt party leading a corrupt government. This kind of sentiment was especially prominent in the wake of the recent spate of scandals plaguing the DPP administration—one of them being Kaohsiung’s problematic MRT project. An Aug. 21 riot, ignited by Thai laborers protesting against their poor living conditions, unexpectedly brought to light a complex influence-peddling scheme in which ranking government officials apparently exploited Thai workers while pocketing money from the project’s construction funds.

January 9 2005 Washington Post article:

Democrats and some Republicans, troubled by the moves, cite parallels between today’s Republicans and the Democrats who lost their 40-year hold on the House in 1994 after Gingrich and other conservatives campaigned against them as autocratic and corrupt, and gained 52 seats.

“It took Democrats 40 years to get as arrogant as we have become in 10,” one Republican leadership aide said.

Julian E. Zelizer, a Boston University history professor who edited the 2004 anthology “The American Congress,” said Republicans used the past week to “accelerate the trend toward strong, centralized parties.”

“This is a move toward empowering the leadership even beyond what you saw in the 1970s and 1980s,” Zelizer said. “They have been going for broke.”

Now you know why I registered to vote as an independent.

UpdateI’d like to apologize for forgetting to link to the article yesterday.

The New York Times has an article exploring the issue of whether there may be more important things than a country’s economic development. A worthy topic, but sadly the article references what is possibly the worst academic survey every conducted.

[B]eyond a certain threshold of wealth people appear to redefine happiness, studies suggest, focusing on their relative position in society instead of their material status.

Nothing defines this shift better than a 1998 survey of 257 students, faculty and staff members at the Harvard School of Public Health.

In the study, the researchers, Sara J. Solnick and David Hemenway, gave the subjects a choice of earning $50,000 a year in a world where the average salary was $25,000 or $100,000 a year where the average was $200,000.

About 50 percent of the participants, the researchers found, chose the first option, preferring to be half as prosperous but richer than their neighbors.

I think that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. They seem to think that people choosing the $100,000 option are twice as wealthy in absolute terms than the people choosing $50,000, but that is utter bollocks.

If the average salary of the world increases by 8-fold and yours drops by half, than in absolute terms you have only 1/16 of the wealth that you had before. Money is not some kind of nano-gel with the ability to transform into an amount of physical material in proportion to the number of units you have, it’s an abstraction that represents the portion of the economy’s total wealth that one controls. The value of individual money units is a simple proportion based on the total amount of money units in existence, this is why we have things like inflation-a concept that seems to have escaped the Harvard School of Public Health.

If they had said ‘town’ or ‘community’ than it might make some sense, because your currency value is still based on the larger economy and in fact would represent a large share of the world’s wealth, but if you’re talking about the entire WORLD’S average income than people who chose the second scenario, much like the people who designed this survey, just don’t know the most basic of math skills.

Unless they were really were testing for basic logic skills, and the whole ‘values of wealth’ thing was just obfuscation.

Update:
Saru linked to a paper by the two Harvard professors in question, which contains a survey with various questions making the same test in both monetary and non-monetary terms. It contains one question identical to, and one almost identical to the one listed in the NYT article, except it is phrased exactly the way it should be. The raises the question, was this a mistake by the NYT writer or editor, or did the professors give the reporter a dumbed-down explanation that wasn’t as clear as their actual paper?

I see that Andrew Revkin, who wrote the NYT article, is one of their regular science writers, but even science journalists aren’t supposed to be experts, and aren’t even expected to fully understand the science themselves. He should have had the professors check his article before publication, and they should have caught that mistake.

First survey:
In the questions below, there are two states of the world (State A and State B). You are asked to pick which of the two you would prefer to live in. The questions are independent. For each question, circle either A or B, or if undecided, both A and B. “Others” is the average other person in society.
[...]
Note that prices are what they are currently and prices (the purchasing power of money) are the same in States A and B.
A: Your current yearly income is $50,000; others earn $25,000.
B: Your current yearly income is $100,000; others earn $200,000.

Second survey:
Note that prices are what they are currently and prices (the purchasing power of money) are the same in States A and B.

A: Your current yearly income is $200,000; others earn $100,000.
B: Your current yearly income is $400,000; others earn 800,000.

All are fangle and in high quality.

Suitable for ages of over 3.

The truth about space robots.

The movie version.

For those who were wondering why Japan has still not ended their ban on US beef, today’s NYT makes it quite clear.

The F.D.A. proposed banning from animal feed the brains and spinal cords of cows more than 30 months old. It also proposed banning the same parts of any animal not passed by inspectors as suitable for human food, any tallow that contained more than 0.15 percent protein and any meat contained in brain or spinal column that was separated from carcasses by machine.

The new proposal would still allow animals to be fed material that some scientists consider potentially infectious, including the brains and spinal cords of young animals; the eyes, tonsils, intestines and nerves of old animals; chicken food and chicken dung swept up from the floors of poultry farms; scrapings from restaurant plates; and calf milk made from cow blood and fat.

[...]

Michael K. Hansen, an expert on prion diseases at the Consumers Union, called the proposed regulations “completely inadequate,” noting that Britain “took many halfway steps in their efforts to eliminate mad cow disease and failed to stop it.” Only when it stopped feeding mammals to food animals did they cut the cases down to less than 10 a year, he said.

Caught off the front page of Amazon Japan:

The fact that this guy is popular is even harder to take than the whole Yon-sama thing. Geez, people, will you get a grip?!

Child Abuser Gets Reduced Sentence
Baby Left With Brain Damage, Skull Fractures

CINCINNATI —A woman whose son was left brain damaged by a child abuser is trying to petition Congress for stricter regulations, News 5’s Sheree Paolello reported.

Adam Richards was sentenced Monday to five years in jail as part of a plea bargain. Richards could have faced up to 20 years in jail, but he had no prior record of abusing children like Dillon Cloud.

Cloud was left in a coma, suffering skull fractures and brain damage after Richards spent two weeks baby-sitting him.

During that time, police said, Richards slammed Cloud into his crib—and even held the infant by his ankles and then dropped him.

“[Doctors] had to keep him ice cold so he didn’t have a fever so his brain wouldn’t swell,” Meghan Cloud, Dillon’s mother, said. “He was helpless. He was laying on the bed and we couldn’t do anything.”

She spent weeks in the hospital, and told Paolello she and her family prayed that they would get some closure when Richards was sentenced. Instead, she said, he was let off the hook.

“It flabbergasts me that there are so many cases of this that the prosecutor has to go this route for a plea deal,” Jay Voline, Meghan’s father, said.

Now the family is trying to get a law passed that would require child abusers to register their addresses, in an effort to stymie the type of suffering Dillon has undergone.

“He doesn’t walk—he doesn’t even try to walk,” Cloud said. “He didn’t crawl till he was 11 months old. He struggles to do everything.”

God that is sad. The poor kid!

The son of a bitch that did this really needs to change his name.

After doing a few random searches, this is by far the coolest thing I’ve found.