Oiligarchy

This game is way better than Lemonade Stand.



Click on the image to go to the game, in which you can "trash the environment, bribe the politicians and squish the little peoples. Don't feel rich enough? Then Drill, Baby, Drill!"

Via The Oil Drum.

Geographic Support for Supreme Court Nominees

With Obama's first Supreme Court nomination imminent, Andrew Gelman looks at this new article (pdf) about public support for some recent Supreme Court nominees across the states and makes these maps:



These maps show relative support, so the difference between a really popular nominee, like Sandra Day O'Connor, and a more controversial one, like Bork, don't show up. Still there are some interesting trends:

• The states where Stephen Breyer, nominated by Clinton in 1994, had his strongest support could best be described as the states Clinton won in 1992.
• O'Connor and Ginsburg, the two women represented here, both had their lowest support in the South, even though one was a conservative nominated by a Republican and the other was a liberal nominated by a Democrat.
• George W. Bush's two nominees, Samuel Alito and John Roberts, had their strongest support in the Plains and the heavily Republican Mormon/Mountain triad of Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming; their weakest support was on the West Coast. That appears to be a new pattern.
  

Gelman's view is that "with 59 Democratic senators and high popularity, Obama could nominate Pee Wee Herman to the Supreme Court and get him confirmed." Probably true, though knowing Obama he'll end up picking a moderate who is just conservative enough to ruffle the feathers of liberals without really making them angry, and to satisfy moderates. And I think it's fair to predict that Rush Limbaugh, and by extension 20,000,000 right wingers, will disapprove of his pick no matter who it is.

The Mind of the Roomba

Apparently a "roomba" is some sort of artificial intelligence device that people actually allow into their homes under the deluded impression that they control it, rather than vice versa. Well, someone set up a long exposure camera in their room to try and track a roomba over the course of half an hour and this map of the thing's movements is what they came up with:



Complex signs - an attempt to communicate with other robots? Proto-military maneuvers? Hard to say. But as always, when it comes to robots, the best stance is a wary one.

From signaltheorist.

Swine Flu: It Still Exists!

Remember how last week we were all going to die because of swine flu? And but now it looks like it just gives you a case of the sniffles? The media does seem to have a difficult time calibrating its coverage of these sorts of issues, doesn't it? Well, fortunately there are people still following the spread of the flu who actually know what they're talking about - people like Dr. Henry Niman, who made this google map of the flu and who has now set up shop with a new and fancier map.



It has numbers of suspected, confirmed and fatal cases for every country, and the data seems to be a bit ahead of other sources. E.g., who knew New Zealand had 174 cases? You can zoom in to see the spread of the virus within countries, too, like yea:



There are other maps as well, like this one of the spread of swine flu in the US by county. Blue counties have had 1-5 cases; greens have had 6-15; yellows have had 16-40; and reds have had more than 40:



Hmm. It seems to be much more widespread in the US now than it is in Mexico. Maybe we ought to close the border and keep the dirty Americans from infecting their neighbors to the south.

Organic Farms in the US

Via The Map Room, The New York Times maps organic farms in the US.



For comparison, the Times also has a map showing the locations of all farms in the US:



Says the Grey Lady:

The map of organic farms in the United States is clustered into a few geographic centers, a strikingly different pattern than the map of all farms, which spreads densely over many regions, breaking only for the Rockies and Western deserts [sic].

Areas in the Northeast and Northwest have many small organic farms that sell produce directly to consumers. Large organic farms, which some call organic agribusiness, have flourished in California.

I leave it to the reader to decide if there's a significant correlation between the map of organic farms and this map.

Is Part of China in the First World?

I'm just gonna keep on keeping on with this intranational HDI comparison kick. Today: China!



There's obviously a huge range in the development levels between the different provinces of China; I'm guessing it's the greatest range in the world, with some areas comparable to European countries like Portugal or the Czech Republic, and peripheral provinces that are more similar to come countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Here's the list of administrative divisions, helpfully pre-compiled by Wikipedia, with the nation with the most similar HDI in parentheses (note that the Chinese numbers are from 2005, and numbers for countries are from 2006):

1. Hong Kong - .938 (Germany)
2. Shanghai - .913 (Kuwait)
3. Macau - .909 (Cyprus)
4. Beijing - .897 (Czech Republic)
5. Tianjin - .877 (Hungary)
6. Zhejiang - .831 (Panama)
7. Jiangsu - .821 (Serbia)
8. Guangdong - .820 (Saint Lucia)
9. Liaoning - .814 (Belarus)
10. Shandong - .797 (Dominica, or Mississippi)
11. Heilongjiang - .786 (Thailand)
12. Fujian - .786 (Ukraine)
13. Jilin - .780 (Armenia)
14. Hebei - .779 (Iran)
China - .777
15. Shanxi - .775 (Tonga)
16. Inner Mongolia - .765 (St. Vincent and the Grenadines)
17. Hainan - .762 (Tunisia)
18. Henan - .758 (Azerbaijan)
19. Chongqing - .756 (Azerbaijan)
20. Hubei - .755 (Paraguay)
21. Hunan - .752 (Paraguay)
22. Xinjiang - .744 (Philippines)
23. Shaanxi - .742 (Sri Lanka)
24. Guangxi - .741 (Sri Lanka)
25. Jiangxi - .735 (Syria)
26. Sichuan - .728 (Turkmenistan)
27. Ningxia - .724 (Guyana)
28. Anhui - .723 (Bolivia)
29. Qinghai - .685 (Vanuatu)
30. Gansu - .681 (Tajikistan)
31. Yunnan - .672 (South Africa)
32. Guizhou - .647 (Morocco)
33. Tibet - .616 (Congo)

The top nine administrative divisions would all be considered to have a high level of human development - an HDI above .800; they're concentrated along the coast. A second tier of provinces is concentrated in the near interior; it runs from Heilongjiang in the northeast down through Hunan and Chongqing in the south. The deep interior and the far south are China's least developed regions, and the more or less colonized region of Tibet is the least developed of all. Of course, all the provinces of China are developing rapidly. In 1975, the country as a whole had an HDI of .523, comparable to Haiti or Bangladesh today. Even as recently as 2000, its HDI was just .721 (comparable to Mongolia). And now it's closing in on .800, which would officially give it high development status, according to this metric. It will be interesting to see to what extent China is able to spread the wealth around and bring all of its provinces along as it continues to make development gains. If the lessons of the US are worth anything, then China may find that historical patterns of uneven development can have a very long legacy indeed.

Is Part of Italy in the Third World?

I wanted to see if other wealthy countries were similar to the US in having a region within their borders that doesn't really live up to the standards of human development that are generally found in the developed world. Italy has the 19th highest HDI score in the world, slightly below that of the US; but like the United States, it's known for the discrepancy between its wealthy and industrialized North and its poorer and more agrarian South. So I looked at the human development index scores of the regions of Italy, found in this paper (pdf); here's what they show.



Here are the specific HDI values.

Piedmont - .919
Emilia Romagna - .910
Marches - .909
Latium - .907
Tuscany - .907
Friuli Venezia Giulia - .906
Valle d'Aosta - .905
Liguria - .904
Umbria - .902
Lombardy - .901
Veneto - .901
Abruzzo - .900
Trentino Alto Adige - .896
Molise - .894
Basilicata - .883
Sardinia - .881
Calabria - .872
Apulia - .868
Sicily - .864
Campania - .857

Now, there's a bit of a complication here. For reasons I can't figure out, the authors of this paper are using HDI numbers for regions that would imply an overall HDI for Italy far below its "official" HDI (in 2006) of .945. So if anything, this data must be understating the level of development in Italian regions, relative to the numbers I used for US states. Nonetheless, the numbers are still useful for showing the relative levels of development of the regions of Italy. And even if these (evidently low) HDI numbers are taken at face value, it's clear that the variance between Italian regions is far less than that between states in the US, where the range is between .799 for Mississippi and .962 for Connecticut - a spread of .163. In Italy, the difference between Campania (.857) and Piedmont (.919) is only .062.

Furthermore, no region in Italy is close to as underdeveloped as the states of the underdeveloped core of the US. Again, even comparing these apparently low numbers to other countries finds that the least developed region of Italy - Campania - is comparable Uruguay or Cuba, above countries like Mexico and Bulgaria, and well above the underdeveloped core of the US, the top HDI of which goes to Kentucky, at .820. And of course if the Italian numbers were projected upward to fall in line with an overall Italian HDI of .945, even Campania would be at or near .900 - comarable to Portugal or the Czech Republic and completely leaving the underdeveloped core of the US South in the dust.

In short: no, part of Italy is not in the Third World.

(By the way, that paper documents that the north, which generally has the highest per capita GDPs in Italy, slips a bit, and the central regions improve, when you look at HDI. For example, Valle d'Aosta, Trentino Alto Adige, and Lombardy have the three highest per capita GDPs, but are only ranked 6th, 13th, and 9th, respectively, among Italian regions in terms of HDI; whereas Marches and Tuscany, ranked 11th and 10th in terms of GDP, jump to 2nd and 3rd in terms of HDI.)

The Weird Politics of the Underdeveloped South

That map of states by human development index score reminded me of something. Remember this New York Times map of voting shifts from 2004 to 2008?



The bluer counties shifted more towards the Democrats in the presidential elections from 2004 to 2008, and red counties shifted more towards the Republicans. The country as a whole shifted about 9.7% more Democratic; but one region stands out for having a lot of counties that actually went more Republican in 2008 - and it sure looks like it correlates pretty strongly with what I described yesterday as the underdeveloped core: the eight states with human development index scores well outside the mainstream for other developed economies. Those states all went for John McCain in 2008, just like they all went for Bush in 2004 and 2000 (though Bill Clinton did pretty well in the region in his two elections). They're not the most Republican states (though Oklahoma's close to the top of that list), but they all seem to be moving towards the Republicans, even as most of the rest of the country moves toward the Democrats.

If anything, this correlation is even more striking when you make the apples-to-apples comparison of state HDI vs. state voting shift from 2004 to 2008.



This shows the voting shift towards the Democrats from 2004 to 2008. The scale is set so that red states shifted less toward the Democrats than the nation as a whole (even though most of them shifted somewhat toward the Democrats) and blue states shifted more toward the Democrats than the nation as a whole. Again, the vote shift in the underdeveloped core was less toward the Democrats than in any other region; five of the 8 states actually shifted toward the Republicans - the only states to do so. Based on Dave Leip's US Election Atlas, here are the states that moved the least toward the Democrats, with their percentage change in the Democratic margin:

1. Arkansas, -10.09
2. Louisiana, -4.12
3. Tennessee, -0.79
4. West Virginia, -0.25
5. Oklahoma, -0.15
6. Massachusetts, +0.65
7. Arizona, +1.99
8. Kentucky, +3.64
9. Alaska, +4.01
10. Alabama, +4.04
11. Mississippi, +6.52

Massachusetts was the home state of the Democrat in 2004, and Arizona and Alaska were the home states of the Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidates in 2008. If you take out those three states, the top 8 states that shifted the least toward the Democrats were precisely those eight states that constitute the underdeveloped core. Does that seem like an odd correlation to you? The states that seem to be moving towards the Republicans are exactly those that have the lowest human development index scores.

One possible explanation for this would hold if Republicans were generally increasing their vote share among poorer people: if that were so, it would be most evident in the poorest states. But according to this compilation of exit poll data, that's not the case; lower income voters moved about as much toward the Democrats as the country as a whole.

Other people have explained the relatively strong Republican showing in this region as a phenomenon of Appalachia or the Upland South. But that doesn't account for the pattern of voting shifts in the Deep South. Some moron also argued that the areas of Republican improvement in 2008 should best be conceptualized as those parts of the South where there are few blacks. But that wouldn't account for the fact that Republicans did well relative to 2004 in some states with lots of blacks, like Louisiana and Mississippi, and not as well in some other states with large black populations, like Georgia and North Carolina. The pattern of areas of relative Republican improvement and the states with very low HDI scores makes for a much tidier correlation.

This is a bit hard to figure out. I mean, it's not like the Republicans are avowedly interested in addressing poverty or issues of human development in any direct way. And it's not as if they're popular among lower income people. Yet here they are making inroads in the one region of the country where levels of human development diverge widely from the norms of the developed world. The only explanation I can think of is that, in areas with lower levels of human development, traditionalist values have a firmer hold, and Republican appeals to those values have been paying off in the underdeveloped South. But it still seems odd that such values would swamp material concerns for voters in the one region of the country where the material standard of living really isn't up to snuff.

Is Part of the United States in the Third World?

EDIT WITH HUGE DISCLAIMER: The US HDI is not at all comparable to the world HDI. The data which this map represent are not, in fact based on the American Human Development Project; and the AHDP's data are not, in fact, suitable for making international comparisons - they were specifically designed with the American context in mind. So consider this a sort of interesting thought exercise, but go to the AHDP's website for the real data. They also have some very nice maps of their own.
___________________

A little while ago I asked if the United States was becoming a third world country. The purpose of that post was to point out that the US had rates of income inequality that were totally out of line with other developed countries, but would have been typical for countries in the developing world.

But there's a much more direct measure of the actual level of development of a country: the human development index. The HDI combines measures of various social indicators, including life expectancy, literacy, education, and per capita GDP, to measure overall human development, which "refers to the process of widening the options of persons, giving them greater opportunities for education, health care, income, employment, etc." By this measure, the United States ranks rather high - 15th out of all countries, with an HDI of .950, according to this table, which is based on 2006 data. But the HDI of individual states varies quite a bit. Here is a map from Wikipedia of states by their human development index score:



This map is based on numbers from this table, which come from the American Human Development Report. It gives a good sense of regional patterns of human development in the US and the comparative relationship of states to each other. But the numbers in the abstract don't tell us much; to see what these numbers mean, we need to compare them to other countries. And when we do that, we see that the HDI of many states are comparable to some of the most developed countries in the world. However, other states have HDI scores well outside the range of the developed economies of Europe and Asia.

To illustrate the point, I am now going to make a long list. These are the 76 top countries ranked by human development index score, with the 50 states interposed to show their relative level of development, based on the two tables linked above:

1. Iceland - .968
2. Norway - .968
3. Canada - .967
4. Australia - .965
5. Ireland - .962
Connecticut - .962
Massachusetts - .961
New Jersey - .961
District of Columbia - .960
Maryland - .960
Hawaii - .959
New York - .959
6. Netherlands - .958
7. Sweden - .958
New Hampshire - .958
Minnesota - .958
Rhode Island - .958
California - .958
Colorado - .958
Virginia - .957
Illinois - .957
8. Japan - .956
9. Luxembourg - .956
10. Switzerland - .955
11. France - .955
Vermont - .955
Washington - .955
Alaska - .955
12. Finland - .954
Delaware - .953
13. Denmark - .952
Wisconsin - .952
14. Austria - .951
Michigan - .951
15. United States - .950
Iowa - .950
Pennsylvania - .950
16. Spain - .949
17. Belgium - .948
18. Greece - .947
Nebraska - .946
19. Italy - .945
20. New Zealand - .944
21. United Kingdom - .942
22. Hong Kong - .942
Kansas - .941
23. Germany - .940
Arizona - .939
North Dakota - .936
Oregon - .935
Maine - .932
Utah - .932
Ohio - .932
24. Israel - .930
Georgia - .928
Indiana - .928
25. South Korea - .927
North Carolina - .925
26. Slovenia - .923
27. Brunei - .919
28. Singapore - .918
Texas - .914
29. Kuwait - .912
30. Cyprus - .912
Missouri - .912
Nevada - .911
31. United Arab Emirates - .903
32. Bahrain - .902
South Dakota - .902
33. Portugal - .900
34. Qatar - .899
Florida - .898
35. Czech Republic - .897
Wyoming - .897
New Mexico - .895
36. Malta - .894
Idaho - .890
37. Barbados - .889
Montana - .885
38. Hungary - .877
39. Poland - .875
40. Chile - .874
41. Slovakia - .872
42. Estonia - .871
South Carolina - .871
43. Lithuania - .869
44. Latvia - .863
45. Croatia - .862
46. Argentina - .860
47. Uruguay - .859
48. Cuba - .855
49. Bahamas - .854
50. Costa Rica - .847
51. Mexico - .842
52. Libya - .840
53. Oman - .839
54. Seychelles - .836
55. Saudi Arabia - .835
56. Bulgaria - .834
57. Trinidad and Tobago - .833
58. Panama - .832
59. Antigua and Barbuda - .830
60. Saint Kitts and Nevis - .830
61. Venezuela - .826
62. Romania - .825
63. Malaysia - .823
64. Montenegro - .822
65. Serbia - .821
66. Saint Lucia - .821
Kentucky - .820
67. Belarus - .817
Tennessee - .816
Oklahoma - .815
Alabama - .809
68. Macedonia - .808
69. Albania - .807
70. Brazil - .807
71. Kazakhstan - .807
72. Ecuador - .807
73. Russia - .806
Arkansas - .803
74. Mauritius - .802
75. Bosnia and Herzegovina - .802
Louisiana - .801
West Virginia - .800
Mississippi - .799
76. Turkey - .798

As you can see, there's a number of states, mostly in the Northeast but some in the Midwest and West, that are as highly developed as just about anywhere in the world. Other states are more similar to the Asian Tiger countries or the more marginal areas of Western Europe. Still others are most comparable to some of the emerging economies of Eastern Europe or the Petrostates of the Middle East.

And then there is a group of Southern States that is a good jag farther down the list. These eight states - Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, West Virginia, and Mississippi - form a core region where human development index scores are well below the HDIs of any other country that would clearly be considered "highly developed." Among the nations that have a higher HDI than each of these states are Cuba, Mexico, Libya, Bulgaria, Panama, Malaysia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Four of these states rank below Albania, which has a per capita GDP of $6,000. In terms of human development, this clutch of states in the Upland and Deep South is well outside of the mainstream of developed economies.

The Three Wests

Headwaters Economics, a non-profit organization focused on issues pertaining to the American West, divides that region into three types of counties.



Blue indicates Metropolitan Counties. This is where the cities are. (And note that the West is the most urbanized region in the country; there's a ton of rural land in the West, but hardly anyone lives out there. For instance, more than 80% of the population of Arizona lives in either the Phoenix or Tucson Metropolitan Statistical Areas.) These areas are characterized by high rates of growth, in terms of population, income, and (at least until recently) jobs. People here are more educated, more of them work in service and manufacturing, and there is less dependence on non-labor sources of income (e.g., Social Security).

Yellow areas are Connected Counties. They don't skew very much towards either the young or the old. They grew slowly in the 1980s, but have grown more quickly since 1990. People here tend to be somewhat more educated, and jobs have been shifting from agriculture and natural resources towards the service sector, with the highest income areas concentrated around airports.

The gray areas, Isolated Counties, are older, less educated, and have slower population growth. Jobs are concentrated in agriculture and natural resources, but incomes are lower and there's more dependence on non-labor sources of income.

Headwaters also has an interactive map that lets you see demographic and economic date for individual counties.

The New Old-Time Geography of Conflict

Robert D. Kaplan has a fascinating article in the new issue of Foreign Policy in which he makes the case for the preeminence of geography in determining the patterns of conquest and conflict throughout the world. He sees this view as a revival of a classical approach to world affairs which had taken a backseat in recent decades. The 20th Century had inaugurated a period of narratives of world affairs driven by broad ideologies - Communism! Fascism! Democracy! - rather than the literal global landscape; but Kaplan argues for returning geography to its erstwhile pride of place in describing world affairs:

In the 18th and 19th centuries, before the arrival of political science as an academic specialty, geography was an honored, if not always formalized, discipline in which politics, culture, and economics were often conceived of in reference to the relief map. Thus, in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, mountains and the men who grow out of them were the first order of reality; ideas, however uplifting, were only the second.

And yet, to embrace geography is not to accept it as an implacable force against which humankind is powerless. Rather, it serves to qualify human freedom and choice with a modest acceptance of fate. This is all the more important today, because rather than eliminating the relevance of geography, globalization is reinforcing it. Mass communications and economic integration are weakening many states, exposing a Hobbesian world of small, fractious regions. Within them, local, ethnic, and religious sources of identity are reasserting themselves, and because they are anchored to specific terrains, they are best explained by reference to geography. Like the faults that determine earthquakes, the political future will be defined by conflict and instability with a similar geographic logic. The upheaval spawned by the ongoing economic crisis is increasing the relevance of geography even further, by weakening social orders and other creations of humankind, leaving the natural frontiers of the globe as the only restraint.

So we, too, need to return to the map, and particularly to what I call the “shatter zones” of Eurasia. We need to reclaim those thinkers who knew the landscape best. And we need to update their theories for the revenge of geography in our time.

Kaplan describes a number of thinkers who had perceived the significance of geography in shaping global affairs. One was the French historian Fernand Braudel, who wrote The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II in 1949, which portrayed the ancient expansions of the Greek and Roman empires as a consequence of the marginal soils of the Mediterranean region. Another was Alfred Thayer Mahan, a US Naval Captain who "saw the Indian and Pacific oceans as the hinges of geopolitical destiny, for they would allow a maritime nation to project power all around the Eurasian rim and thereby affect political developments deep into Central Asia." Yet another was the prescient Dutch-American strategist Nicholas Spykman, who foresaw the necessity of America's protection of Japan and the rise of China before he died in 1943.

But Kaplan focuses particularly on Sir Halford J. Mackinder who, writing 1904, saw the global order as the inevitable product of the relations established across the vast expanses of Eurasia:

His thesis is that Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia are the “pivot” around which the fate of world empire revolves. He would refer to this area of Eurasia as the “heartland” in a later book. Surrounding it are four “marginal” regions of the Eurasian landmass that correspond, not coincidentally, to the four great religions, because faith, too, is merely a function of geography for Mackinder. There are two “monsoon lands”: one in the east generally facing the Pacific Ocean, the home of Buddhism; the other in the south facing the Indian Ocean, the home of Hinduism. The third marginal region is Europe, watered by the Atlantic to the west and the home of Christianity. But the most fragile of the four marginal regions is the Middle East, home of Islam, “deprived of moisture by the proximity of Africa” and for the most part “thinly peopled” (in 1904, that is).

Europe's history, in the context of this landscape, is the story of an appendage to the great Eurasian landmass, despite the anomalous "Columbian epoch" of European discovery and colonialism. And the history of Russia, in particular, can be read as the history of a nation thoroughly traumatized by its invasion by Mongol hordes, and a consequent obsession with territorial acquisitiveness. This would later lead, during the Cold War, to a recapitulation of the struggle for control over the marginal areas of Eurasia, with a US containment policy of Communism that "depended heavily on rimland bases across the greater Middle East and the Indian Ocean."

Kaplan sees the geostrategically most important regions of the world as spreading through the same arc of lands - from the Middle East through South Asia and East Asia - that Mackinder described as the marginal regions of Eurasia. But unlike in previous centuries, these areas are deeply integrated with each other - rubbing shoulders, thanks to technological change, rather than being separate by natural geographical buffers as they had been in the past. (For example, countries from Israel through Iran, Pakistan, India, China, and North Korea form a contiguous overlapping region in which one country's ballistic missile range infringes on that of its neighbors.) Within this zone of potential geopolitical turbulence, Kaplan describes four "shatter zones" that may be particularly prone to instability and conflict in the decades ahead.

One shatter zone is the Indian subcontinent, where Nepal and Bangladesh constitute alarmingly weak states and are home to tens of millions of people; but they are paragons of stability compared to Pakistan and Afghanistan:

Of course, the worst nightmare on the subcontinent is Pakistan, whose dysfunction is directly the result of its utter lack of geographic logic. The Indus should be a border of sorts, but Pakistan sits astride both its banks, just as the fertile and teeming Punjab plain is bisected by the India-Pakistan border. Only the Thar Desert and the swamps to its south act as natural frontiers between Pakistan and India. And though these are formidable barriers, they are insufficient to frame a state composed of disparate, geographically based, ethnic groups—Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis, and Pashtuns—for whom Islam has provided insufficient glue to hold them together. All the other groups in Pakistan hate the Punjabis and the army they control, just as the groups in the former Yugoslavia hated the Serbs and the army they controlled. Pakistan’s raison d’être is that it supposedly provides a homeland for subcontinental Muslims, but 154 million of them, almost the same number as the entire population of Pakistan, live over the border in India.

The Pashtuns occupy a swathe of land that sprawls across portions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. If Pakistan falls apart, "Pashtunistan" would likely arise to partially take its place, which in turn would lead to the total dissolution of Afghanistan.

A second shatter zone is the Arabian peninsula. Interestingly, Kaplan describes the threat in this region not as arising within the Saudi Kingdom itself, but across the porous Saudi border with Yemen. Kaplan describes Yemen, a chaotic country in the southwestern corner of the peninsula that has almost as many people as Saudi Arabia itself, as "crowded with pickup trucks filled with armed young men, loyal to this sheikh or that, while the presence of the Yemeni government was negligible...Estimates of the number of firearms in Yemen vary, but any Yemeni who wants a weapon can get one easily. Meanwhile, groundwater supplies will last no more than a generation or two." Yemen, by the way, has one of the highest birth rates in the world.

A third shatter zone is in the area of the Fertile Crescent. In this case, it is due to the fact that the state borders of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq are almost totally divorced from the realities of natural geography that the potential for conflict exists. This is particularly true in the case of Iraq. Since there is nothing "natural" about the borders of Iraq - either in terms of natural borders or the distribution of ethnic and religious groups - a succession of strongmen has arisen in the country to hold the disparate pieces of the national fabric together. Saddam Hussein was the most recent, though not necessarily the last, of these. Some American intelligence experts tried to envision a more "rational" ordering of states in the Middle East - one that would reflect the realities of physical and cultural geography in the region:



(Though just a thought experiment, this map, which was posted at Strange Maps, caused a bit of a kerfuffle in the Middle East, where some people, understandably suspicious of American intentions in the region, saw it as arrogant and colonialist; of course, it was colonialism that led to the capricious carving of borders in the Middle East in the first place.)

The Persian Core, stretching from the Persian Gulf through the interior of Iran to the Caspian Sea, constitutes a final shatter zone. This region contains a huge amount of oil and natural gas wealth, both in the Persian Gulf and Caspian regions, and Iran has a hand in each of those regions. And Iran controls most of the Persian Gulf, including its entrance to the Indian Ocean at the Strait of Hormuz. According to Kaplan, its not accidental that Persia has played a prominent role throughout history. Unlike the other nations of the Middle East, its territorial borders follow the patterns of its natural geography.

Its border roughly traces and conforms to the natural contours of the landscape—plateaus to the west, mountains and seas to the north and south, and desert expanse in the east toward Afghanistan. For this reason, Iran has a far more venerable record as a nation-state and urbane civilization than most places in the Arab world and all the places in the Fertile Crescent. Unlike the geographically illogical countries of that adjacent region, there is nothing artificial about Iran. Not surprisingly, Iran is now being wooed by both India and China, whose navies will come to dominate the Eurasian sea lanes in the 21st century.

The threat in Iran is not, as in the other shatter zones, in its potential for dissolution; rather, its that a geographically unified and strong Persian state might erupt out of its own borders to create instability in the surrounding regions.

Kaplan concludes by noting that "we all must learn to think like Victorians." That is, we have to be open to the insights of geographical determinism: the view that geography and climate, more than ideology, will drive the important events and conflicts of the next century. Kaplan uses another word to describe this attitude - a word that had lost some of its currency in the years after September 11th, but which now is enjoying something of a revival: realism.

UPDATE: For an interesting and skeptical take on Kaplan's article, go here.

Mood Map of the United States

Via the Southern Political Report, this map, based on data from a telephone survey performed by the Centers for Disease Control, shows percentages of residents who reported more than 14 days of emotional discomfort, including "stress, depression and problems with emotion" over the prior month.



Appalachia has problems. Kentucky is the saddest state, with 14.4% reporting extended periods of mental discomfort, and a depression belt stretches right through the entire Upland South region from West Virginia to Oklahoma. This corresponds to a region with some of the highest rates of neuroticism, as well as some of the lowest rates of overall well-being.

At the other end of the spectrum, the most content states are Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, and - happiest of all, for utterly inexplicable reasons - Hawaii. All of those states had fewer than 8% report sustained mental distress.

What strikes me about this map is that urban and suburban counties generally seem to rate consistently toward the middle of the mood spectrum throughout different regions of the country (albeit with a few exceptions, like Los Angeles, Detroit and Tampa). But rural areas vary dramatically - the happiest counties are rural areas of the Upper Midwest, and the saddest counties are, again, rural areas of the Upland South. So what accounts for the discrepancy? Well, broadly speaking, National Geographic says this:

Previous studies have linked regional income and education levels to well-being. And in general, people with higher incomes and college degrees report fewer instances of prolonged depression or stress, said study author Matthew Zack, a medical epidemiologist with the CDC.

But that's probably not the whole story, he added.

For example, communities with low [frequent mental distress] levels may have above-average support structures for residents—subsidized health clinics, for example, or job-retraining programs.

"There may be different influences in different communities," Zack said. "Once we find out what the most important ones are, we may be able to develop programs to reduce the levels of mental distress."

So are such support structures much more prevalent in places like the rural Midwest than in Appalachia? And if so, why? And what accounts for some of the intra-regional differences, like the fact that people in the Appalachian counties of Tennessee and North Carolina seem to be happier than their counterparts in Kentucky and Virginia? And why is it that Oklahoma is not just very sad, but appears to taint neighboring regions in other states? Lots of intriguing questions here.

This study will be published in the June 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

China and US Trade

Mint has a visualization of trade relations between the US and China, and between those countries and the world.



Some numbers from the graphic:

Total US Exports: $1.38 Trillion
Total Chinese Exports: $1.47 Trillion
Total US imports: $2.19 Trillion
Total Chinese imports: $1.16 Trillion
Total US Exports to China: $71.4 Billion
Total Chinese Exports to the US: $337.8 Billion
Top destination for US exports: Canada ($261.4 Billion)
Top destination for Chinese exports: US; EU is next ($300.5 Billion)
Top source of US imports: China; Canada is next ($335.6 Billion)
Top source of Chinese imports: Japan ($152.1 Billion)

More Swine Flu Maps

Search Engine Land has links to some more maps of the porcine influenza. You know how google has a flu map for the US based on web search activity? Well, they've added an experimental flu map for Mexico, based on the same principles.



A few bits seem to be missing in this map of Mexico, but you can make out some trends: Oaxaca, Morelos, the Distrito Federal, and Quintana Roo (the best-named Mexican state) are showing the most "flu activity," as per Google's algorithms. One wonders, though, if their method holds up when there's so much media attention on the flu: couldn't all the news stories influence rates of Google searches?

Meanwhile, Tech Crunch looks at searches for "swine flu" across the 50 states. It's not as precise as Google Flu. As Tech Crunch notes, "this method is less likely to be predictive of the actual spread of the disease because it just measures raw searches." So think if it as one interesting data point, and nothing to hang your epidemiological hat on; and what that one data point shows is that the top ten states for swine flu searches are: Texas, Indiana, New York, Vermont, New Mexico, Kansas, Illinois, Ohio, Arizona, and California. Again, this goes into the "for what it's worth category;" but it's interesting that several of those states have already had reported or suspected cases. That's probably just a reflection of media attention on reported cases, but if, say, Vermont and New Mexico pop up next in CDC reports, this map will have been prescient.

HealthMap is tracking swine flu by posting news reports and even some anecdotal reports from around the world.



The redder the marker, the more serious the news: "Swine Flu: Zambia Takes Steps" is a light yellow, "Fort Worth Schools Close for Swine Flu" is a rather more ominous crimson. (HealthMap also follows news of outbreaks of all sorts.)

Another map shows reported cases as well as the travel paths of infected individuals, according to news reports. And this heat map, at UMapper, gives a good picture of areas where the virus is currently spreading, with higher concentrations in white, shading towards purple at the peripheries.



Of course, if you like your swine flu maps to have the imprimatur of big media officialdom, you can check out the New York Times' characteristically high-quality maps of the outbreak in both the States and throughout the world.



And the BBC's map has a slider that lets you see the spread of the disease in pseudo-animation. Meanwhile, remember that google map of swine flu I posted a couple of days ago? Turns out it was put together by Dr. Henry Niman, an expert on viruses at the University of Pittsburgh. So that's good! Niman talks about his map in a video interview here.

Well, I guess I've gone and contributed, in my tiny way, to the media frenzy over swine flu. But I couldn't help it - this thing is just so eminently mappable.

The Most Photographed Places in the World

A team of Cornell researchers has developed a method for mapping out the locations of about 35 million images from Flickr. The resultant visualizations, as described in their paper (pdf), look like this image, which shows the locations where Flickr photos were taken, and includes representative images of the most photographed landmarks in the 20 most photographed cities in Europe.



The goal of their work is to "investigate the interplay between structure and content — using text tags and image features for content analysis and geospatial information for structural analysis." In other words, all photographs are of places; it therefore makes sense to organize them spatially, i.e., with maps. Furthermore, this information can be combined with the subjects of photographs to, as the researchers put it, create

a fascinating picture of what the world is paying attention to. In the case of global photo collections, it means that we can discover, through collective behavior, what people consider to be the most significant landmarks both in the world and within specific cities; which cities are most photographed; which cities have the highest and lowest proportions of attention drawing landmarks; which views of these landmarks are the most characteristic; and how people move through cities and regions as they visit different locations within them. These resulting views of the data add to an emerging theme in which planetary-scale datasets provide insight into different kinds of human activity — in this case those based on images; on locales, landmarks, and focal points scattered throughout the world; and on the ways in which people are drawn to them.

The researchers analyze photos taken at the levels of both metropolitan areas and individual landmarks. They can determine, for instance, that the seven most photographed landmarks in the world are

1. The Eiffel Tower
2. Trafalgar Square
3. Tate Modern Art Museum
4. Big Ben
5. Notre Dame Cathedral
6. The London Eye
7. The Empire State Building

They can also rank landmarks within cities; the three most photographed places in Boston, for instance, are Fenway Park, Trinity Church, and Faneuil Hall.

The ten most photographed cities, meanwhile, are

1. New York
2. London
3. San Francisco
4. Paris
5. Los Angeles
6. Chicago
7. Washington
8. Seattle
9. Rome
10. Amsterdam

Another interesting product of their work is that, using time stamps on photos, they're able to approximate the routes traveled by Flickr photographers.

Geotagged and timestamped photos on Flickr create something like the output of a rudimentary GPS tracking device: every time a photo is taken, we have an observation of where a particular person is at a particular moment of time. By aggregating this data together over many people, we can reconstruct the typical pathways that people take as they move around a geospatial region. For example, Figure 1 shows such diagrams for Manhattan and the San Francisco Bay area. To produce these figures, we plotted the geolocated coordinates of sequences of images taken by the same user, sorted by time, for which consecutive photos were no more than 30 minutes apart. We also discarded outliers caused by inaccurate timestamps or geolocations. In the figure we have superimposed the resulting diagrams on city maps for ease of visualization.

The top image shows pathways through Manhattan; the densest movement appears to be through Midtown and the Times Square area, with a secondary area of popularity in Lower Manhattan and across the Brooklyn Bridge. The bottom image shows pathways in the San Francisco Bay area; downtown appears to be popular, as well as the trendy neighborhoods of Nob Hill, Russian Hill, North Beach, and the touristy Fisherman's Wharf. Golden Gate Bridge and what looks to be the University of California at Berkeley are secondary nodes of interest.

This is all very reminiscent of what the folks at Columbia were trying to do in describing the geography of buzz; it depends on the same principle that we can learn something about what places are important by analyzing what places people are paying attention to, and we can do that by looking at what places people are taking pictures of. It's a clever idea, and an example, I think, of how the digitization of information is allowing us to have an exceptionally more fine-grained understanding of not just the world itself, but also of how we look at the world. But it also recalls something from Don DeLillo's novel White Noisein which a bridge somewhere in the Midwest is famous for being the most photographed bridge in the world. In other words, it's famous just because it's famous; and the experience of perceiving the object - famous for being perceived - becomes a weirdly important moment for the perceiver in that it authenticates the perceiver's sense of belonging in society and in history (what Umberto Eco might call a hyperreal moment). And I think it's true that people find it important, for whatever reason, to document their perception of highly-perceived objects like the Eiffel Tower - your photo of the Eiffel Tower is the "proof" that you've been to Paris; it's a token of a certain sort of experience, not because the Eiffel Tower is itself important, or particularly interesting to you, but because it is an iconic representation which many people can relate to precisely because it is a famous image with which people are familiar; it is, in short, famous for being famous. (Look at the images of landmarks on postcards at any sidewalk vendor in the world for other examples of images which have this same function of authenticating one's experience of a place.) But if this is the case, then I don't think the authors of this paper are justified in claiming that what they've documented is "what people are paying attention to," because taking a photograph of something is not necessarily a significant act of "paying attention to" something. Rather, it is often the more trivial act of doing something like documenting your perception of the most often perceived bridge in the world; it is a documentation of your having seen something which is famous for being seen. So at the end of the day, these researchers' exercise has a certain circular quality: it is documenting what places people are paying attention to based on what places people believe are being paid attention to. It's sort of interesting to have such documentation; but it doesn't amount to a documentation of what places are "most important," or even of what places people are paying most attention to. If people are genuinely focused on some object, after all, in most cases they probably wouldn't even think to photograph it.

Green Energy Potential in the US

The Natural Resources Defense Council has a new ugly map of green energy potential in the United States.



In the map layer shown above, darker shades of blue indicate higher wind energy potential. You can click on wind turbine icons to see details on individual facilities; it's a lot of good information, even if it is unattractively presented. It also has layers showing cellulosic biomass, biogas, and solar energy potential. The detail on the left shows the very high solar potential in the Southwest. The NRDC also has profiles on a few selected states, with more profiles in the offing.

The map complements this one, which they released a month ago, that looks at areas that would be harmed by the development of new renewable energy infrasructure. It appears to be the continuation of an effort on the part of the NRDC to try to define the terms of the debate as plans to invest in renewable energy go forward. Seems like a savvy thing to do.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory also has several good maps on green energy potential.

Swine Flu: The Inevitable Google Map

It was only a matter of time before this showed up.



A Google map of the spread of the global health scare du jour. Pink markers are suspected cases; purple markers are confirmed or probable; deaths have no dot in the middle of the marker; yellow markers are negative cases. Click on markers for copious details on individual cases.

That someone would make such a map may have been inevitable, but nonetheless: note how cool it is. The map format, combined with (theoretically) near-time updates on reported cases and free 'n easy public access make this an ideal medium for monitoring the spread of an epidemic like swine flu.

Open Source Map of the World

Redhat.com has an interactive map ranking the world's countries (a goodly portion of them, at any rate) by their amenity to open sourciness.



The map is based on the Open Source Index, which was put together by researchers at Georgia Tech. Says redhat:

The OSI is a measure of the open source activity and environment in 75 countries. Each country is given a score based on its policies, practices, and other data in the fields of Government, Industry, and Community.

Click on a country to see the country's rank (1 being the highest, 75 being the lowest) in open source activity. One map shows Activity, which measures the amount of open source happening today. It tends to be made up of concrete factors, such as existing open source and open standards policies and number of OSS users, such as Linux and Google.

You can also see an Environmental map, which is more speculative. Even a country that does not have a high degree of current penetration of open source may have a high number of internet users and information technology patents. These factors may indicate a favorable environment for open source software to take hold.

Clicking on a country will show its overal open source ranking among the 75 countries rated, as well as its ranking in government, industry, and community factors. Government factors include official policies; industry factors include "the number of registered OSS users per capita and internet growth"; and community factors include "the number of applications to the Google summer of code, native language support for GNU/Linux, and number of Internet users per capita."

The number one overall ranking goes to France, followed by Spain, Germany, Australia, Finland, Great Britain, Norway, Estonia, the US, and Denmark. Moldova's 75th best. Out of 75.