Progress Daily

According to a new report from a UN commission, 2 in every 3 people (some 4 billion in total) are “excluded from the rule of law.” Around 40% of the developing world’s five-year-old children are not registered as even existing. Later, people will find that the home they live in, the land they farm, or the business that they start, is not protected by legally enforceable property rights. Even in the rare cases when they can afford to go to court, the service is poor. India, for example, has only 11 judges for every 1m people.

Because they are outside the rule of law, the vast majority of poor people are obliged to work (if they work at all) in the informal economy, which is less productive than the formal, legal part of the economy. According to the report, this is one of the main reasons why so much of humanity remains mired in poverty.

“The law poor,” The Economist

Ray Kurzweil predicts that if you can live another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then you can be around for the Singularity (when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software) a few decades later.

In 1976, when Kurzweil pioneered a device that could scan books and read them aloud, it was the size of a washing machine. Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century” blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. Kurzweil debuted his cellphone-sized reader this year.

In the late 1980s, Kurzweil predicted the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s and a computer chess champion by 1998 (a year late, it turned out).

Kurzweil makes his predictions using what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns. More than a century ago, machines’ computing power doubled about every three years; then in midcentury the doubling came every two years; now it takes only about a year.

During the past century there has been exponential growth in the number of patents issued, the spread of telephones, the money spent on education, etc.

Exponential progress has recently begun in nanotechnology, the ease of gene sequencing, and the resolution of brain scans.

Kurzweil says that if his predictions seem overly optimistic that’s because exponential upward curves appear deceptively gradual at first.

“Scientists imagine they’ll keep working at the present pace. They make linear extrapolations from the past. When it took years to sequence the first 1% of the human genome, they worried they’d never finish, but they were right on schedule for an exponential curve. If you reach 1% and keep doubling your growth every year, you’ll hit 100% in just seven years.”

“The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least,” by John Tierney

A new study by Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, et al. (”Culture, Gender, and Math“), took data from the 2003 OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (in which some 280K 15-year-olds from 40 countries took the same math and reading tests) and compared the results, by country, with each-other and with various measures of social sexual equality (such as the World Economic Forum’s gender-gap index).

On average, girls’ maths scores were lower than those of boys. The gap was largest in countries (such as Turkey) with the least equality between the sexes, & vanished in countries with the most equality — except for geometry scores, which had no relation to sexual equality. The researchers did some additional statistical checks to ensure the correlation was material, and not generated by another, third variable that is correlated with sexual equality, such as GDP per person.

The gap in reading scores not only remained, but got bigger as the sexes became more equal. Average reading scores were higher for girls than for boys in all countries. But in more equal societies, not only were the girls as good at math as the boys, their advantage in reading had increased.

This may explain why, despite girls’ rise to mathematical equality in some countries, women in those countries have not invaded math-heavy professions, such as engineering. Economic optimization is about comparative advantage. The rise in female reading scores alongside their math scores suggests that female comparative advantage in this area has not changed.

“Vital statistics,” The Economist

According to a new report by Marilyn A. Brown, et al., (”Shrinking the Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America“) each resident of the 100 largest US metropolitan areas is responsible on average for about 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide in energy consumption each year, 14% below the 2.9 ton national average.

Those 100 cities (where two thirds of the people in the US live) still account for 56% of the nation’s carbon dioxide pollution. But their greater use of mass transit and population density reduce the per-person average.

Emissions of carbon dioxide are highest in the eastern US, where people rely heavily on coal for electricity. They are lower in the West, where weather is more favorable and where electricity and motor fuel prices have been higher.

“City dwellers dubbed ‘green’,” by H. Josef Hebert