12.1 Death penalty in USA
12.2 Jerusalem where economics triumphs over violence
12.3 Investors Keep Guessing Wrong About the Fed's Rate Moves lass
12.4 Free access to science research (The Debate)
12.5 Qatar's World Cup 'slaves'
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12.1 Death penalty in USA (18/12/2014)
The number of executions in the United States continued to decline in 2014, with 35 people put to death, compared with a peak of 98 in 1999 and 39 last year.
There were 72 death sentences imposed this year, the lowest in 40 years and down seven from last year, according to a report released Thursday from the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) in Washington.
The decline in the use of the death penalty stems from a combination of factors, including a large drop in violent crime between the late 1980s and early 2000s and the fact that all states with the death penalty now offer the alternative of life in prison without parole.
But various aspects surrounding how the death penalty is imposed have also been troubling to some state leaders in recent years.
“Six states since 2007 have abolished it completely.... They said the death penalty risks innocent lives, the death penalty costs a lot, the death penalty is biased in some cases,” says Richard Dieter, DPIC’s executive director.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/
12.2 Jerusalem where economics triumphs over violence (21/12/2014)
The Arabs of Jerusalem, totaling some 350 thousand people, account for about 40 percent of the city's population. They have a higher income than the Arabs of the West Bank, but the cost of living is also higher in Jerusalem - especially housing prices, which are sometimes four times higher than in the West Bank.
The Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem are codependent. Where one can separate Israel from Gaza and the West Bank with fences and barriers, in Jerusalem this is impossible, with the Jewish and Arab neighborhoods so intertwined.
So one may assume that economic rules will prevail over politics in Jerusalem, over incitement and over fear. There is no one to replace the tens of thousands of Arabs who work in the capital; not immigrants, not haredim and not the few middle class left in the Rehavia neighborhood.
http://www.ynetnews.com/
12.3 Investors Keep Guessing Wrong About the Fed's Rate Moves lass (22/12/2014)
The Federal Reserve keeps saying it’s going to raise interest rates. The markets keep believing it. And then rates stay glued to the floor. That’s been the pattern since at least 2008, early in the devastating recession, as this remarkable chart from Deutsche Bank Securities (DBK:GR) shows.
The underlying problem has been overoptimism about the economic outlook. ....
http://www.businessweek.com/
12.4 Free access to science research (The Debate) (22/12/2014)
Virginia Barbour has worked at the Public Library of Science—one of the groups at the forefront of the open access battle—for ten years now. She says that the perception of which journals are most valuable is changing. “Alongside the growth of open access has been an increased understanding that measuring the journal that way isn’t really working anymore.”
Gezelter and Bates don’t agree. “No, I think it’s getting more entrenched,” Gezelter told me. “The people reviewing us aren’t necessarily reading our papers but they can count, so they’re counting our papers. This problem is actually not being helped.” Bates agreed. “I think it’s getting worse, and I think in some cases it’s getting much worse.”
... Here’s one way to understand the perceived distinction in journal status. Many people use something called an Impact Factor to measure how influential a journal is. The Impact Factor is a simple calculation: take the number of times articles were cited the year after they were published, and divide that by the total number of articles the journal published in the same year. Based on that ratio, Nature’s impact factor was 42 in 2013. The open-access journal Public Library of Science, One had an impact factor of 3.5 that year. Impact Factor has been heavily criticized, methodologically, and many have called for institutions and funding agencies to completely ignore it. But the fact is that they don’t. More than that, some universities don’t allow scientists to put any paper on their tenure application that was published in a journal with an impact factor below five.
http://www.theatlantic.com/
12.5 Qatar's World Cup 'slaves' (26/12/2014)
25 Sept 2013:
Dozens of Nepalese migrant labourers have died in Qatar in recent weeks and thousands more are enduring appalling labour abuses, a Guardian investigation has found, raising serious questions about Qatar's preparations to host the 2022 World Cup.
This summer, Nepalese workers died at a rate of almost one a day in Qatar, many of them young men who had sudden heart attacks. The investigation found evidence to suggest that thousands of Nepalese, who make up the single largest group of labourers in Qatar, face exploitation and abuses that amount to modern-day slavery, as defined by the International Labour Organisation, during a building binge paving the way for 2022.
http://www.theguardian.com/
Dec 24, 2014:
Qatar 2022 Fifa World Cup: One migrant worker dies
every day
Human Rights Watch warned that hundreds of migrant workers
are at risk of exploitation and abuse in Qatar and urged the government
and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) to
commit to guaranteeing basic rights to workers.
12.1 The end of shop class (9/2/2012)
12.1 The end of shop class (9/2/2012)
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