State-Society-Culture Dynamics

Go ahead. Scream “Superstition!” at the top of your lungs. I think that spectacular celestial events such as the total solar eclipse tomorrow (Asians will be in the night side of the planet when it happens, and therefore will not be seeing it) are reminders to us. “Calls for attention”, if you will. “Signals”, “beeps”, “alarms”...”warnings”? Celestial semioticists (astrologers for you who prefer it straight) don’t call them “signs” for nothing. Before anything else, here are the facts. The exact moment of the eclipse will be at 6:31 pm, Universal Planetary Time (Greenwich, UK), and Americans (the US) will see or feel the darkening of the sun as early as 10 am. The geographic details have been worked out and is being discussed all over the Net. I’ll try to download and post here the graphs and the GIF (copyrighted Sinclair 2000) of the path of the eclicpse by Strickling (posted at Wikipedia). Back to the “signs” now. On a purely observational level, they are noti...

PHOTO CREDIT: Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balangiga_massacre. Retrieved August 3, 2017 You think President Duterte is a ruthless killer of drug users, and a political dictator. Well, we can continue to debate this, and I think that for some time in the future, we will. But one very good thing for this President is that he is a Filipino, a nationalist who unlike the Filipino of Bulosan and Ileto, is a remembering Filipino. His SONA of 2017 included a request for the Americans to return the bells of Balanginga, attended by a retelling of the American massacre of Filipinos in Balangiga, Samar, an initiative that left me momentarily stunned at the deep sentiments of this man who is proving to be a maverick President. When this President remembers, he remembers “historically”, in the sense of a sociological fact, not merely “personally”, much in the sense of C. Wright Mills concept of social issue as against mere personal trouble. It is in this light that I...

Let's hear it from the LSE: Not punishment or revenge, but stone-cold sober calculations: the EU will drive a hard bargain Twitter Facebook LinkedIn WhatsApp Email Share Having triggered Article 50 of the EU Treaty, the British government officially kicked off the Brexit negotiations on March 29. Until today, both parties pretended not to give in and instead promised a tough negotiation strategy. Game theory offers one way of testing the reliability of these claims and allowing the negotiations to be seen for what they are: a strategically driven, tactical game in which each side attempts to realise their own interests, write  Berthold Busch, Matthias Diermeier, Henry Goecke, and Michael Hüther. From the perspective of game theory, the search for the optimal negotiation strategy for the UK’s exit from the EU can be stylised as follows: both players, the UK and the EU, simultaneously choose between only two negotiation strategies – one compromising and the ot...

Marcos GDP Growth Negative 1966 6.4 Billions 1982 37.1 Billions 8.36 1986 29.9 Billions 7.34 -5.39 Cory 1986 29.9 Billions 1992 53 Billions 7.79 Data for this post are from IECONOMICS.COM. The calculations are mine, using the continuous compounding mechanism of the exponential curve (this is like the bank's compound interest rate, only that instead of a quarterly or annual compounding, the compounding is done continuously). As a result, the rates would be a bit lower than if I used the compound interest rate. So much the better, you can say that this is a conservative view. SO, WHAT ARE THE RESULTS? Before the decline 1981-1982, the average annual growth rate was rather good, but slightly behind the East Asian tigers (Hong Kong prior to Chinese reunification, SoKor, Taiwan and Singapore) at 8.36 percent per annum. Still, you could say it w...

Evicted by Matthew Desmond – what if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people? ‘There is an enormous amount of pain and poverty in this rich land,’ argues American sociologist Desmond in this brilliant book about housing and the lives of eight families in Milwaukee W hat if the dominant discourse on poverty is just wrong?What if the problem isn’t that poor people have bad morals – that they’re lazy and impulsive and irresponsible and have no family values – or that they lack the skills and smarts to fit in with our shiny 21st-century economy? What if the problem is that poverty is profitable? These are the questions at the heart of Evicted , Matthew Desmond’s extraordinary ethnographic study of tenants in low-income housing in the deindustrialised middle-sized city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. You might not think that there is a lot of money to be extracted from a dilapidated trailer park or a black neighbourhood of “sagging ...

What if our knees now ache from rheumatism? Didn't we climb hills and trees? If now we indulge in bitter politics? We truly loved once. So what if now is dark? Tomorrow there will be sun, and the morning bright.

Assuming the survey responses were gathered appropriately (methodologically compliant), then the estimates of prevalence can be interpreted meaningfully in terms of an electoral race, provided the percent standard error is considered. Bobbi tiglao also posits that another crucial parameter needs to be estimated and included in the calculation of voting preference: that of machinery generated votes, which should be added to the survey responses. Now since the two quantities are additive, we can analyze the survey preferences before or after the machinery generated votes are included, and the results will be the same. It is more intuitive, though, to consider it at the end when the quantities are compounded into a single measure. Let us now go to the final estimates (survey responses plus machinery generated). Source: Tiglao, see FB posts If we use the SWS declared standard error */- 6 percent, then the following conclusions are warranted: 1. there...