I’m heading home for the holidays, and because my home is in a tiny town in rural Ontario (and therefore doesn’t have access to high speed internet) I probably won’t be blogging much until January.
I hope everyone enjoys a much needed break and a peaceful and happy new year. I’ll see you in 2010.
The eight years before 9/11 had a higher percentage of articles tagged with both Islam and terrorism than the eight years after. This change is not accounted for by an increase in tags of “jihad,” as that tag (or one similar to it) doesn’t exist.
On the other hand, in the eight before 9/11, 27% of all articles tagged with Islam were also tagged with terrorism (this is what you see if you only look at the blue and green areas). In the eight years after, that number increased to 43%. All of the usual data quality caveats apply.
The data for all of these charts is from the New York Times Article Search API.
Jessica Cohen and Bill Easterly have a new edited book coming out called What Works in Development? Thinking Big and Thinking Small. The volume examines the role of randomized evaluations in development research and the contributors are a who’s who of top development economists. You can find Bill’s summary of the book here. Apparently there are some problems getting the book out the door, but it is worth keeping on your radar.
Grad student alert: You can find the original (free) papers that the book is based on here.
*Unhappy thoughts means some combination of foreign aid, immigration and refugees, civil war and guerrilla warfare, terrorism, “war crimes, genocide or crimes against humanity” (all one category), famine, drought, or AIDS.
Over the whole period, this collection of negative topics averaged 28% of total articles on the continent.
Again, the tagging system that the Times uses is opaque, the tags are vague, and most importantly, it seems like a lot of articles with “Africa” as the location tag lack desciptive tags (like “famine” or “ponies”). In short, be skeptical of the graph’s validity.
The graph above shows some of data mentioned here broken down by year. As I mentioned the last time I used these stats, articles tagged “Africa” are on the continent and do not include articles on individual countries within Africa. If you are comparing this graph to the one on Somalia keep in mind that the scale of both axes has changed.
I figured out some new tricks with the New York Times’ API while I was procrastinating. Basically, this lets me use the logical ‘and’ command to explore the tags that are assigned to articles. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this earlier.
The graph above shows all articles with Somalia as the location tag and “PIRACY AT SEA” as the description tag, divided by the total number of articles on Somalia. I looked at monthly data. April was the high point with 88% of all articles covering piracy.
A map of instances of malaria in the United States in 1870. In some places, it apparently accounted for 1 in 7 deaths. America was also hit by some brutal yellow fever outbreaks, but somehow managed to do pretty well over the ensuing hundred years. Let’s say it together everyone, geography is not destiny.
via Boing Boing, originally on iayork.com
