Spielberg on the Sound of Close Encounters

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/10/15/steven_spielberg_breaks_down_the_sound_of_close_encounters_of_the_third.html?wpisrc=newsletter_rubric


If you try to imagine the typical big dramatic reveal from a Hollywood film, you’re likely to think of screams and roars and swelling orchestras.  We see the dinosaurs, or the monster, or the Balrog for the first time, and if we’re sitting in the front row the brass will blow our hair back.

For Close Encounters of the Third Kind, however, Steven Spielberg decided to do something different. Like Alfred Hitchcock filming a terrifying attack scene in the middle of the day, Spielberg wanted to film his big reveal in an eerie silence. For the video below, critic and Slate contributor Tom Shone spoke to Spielberg about the sound design of that scene, when Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) first encounters a UFO. (He made the video for his students at NYU, but posted it on his blog over the weekend.) Spielberg tells Shone how he and sound editor Frank Warner scored the scene with almost complete silence—you literally hear crickets—to enhance the suspense and bring out all the “particulars” of the scene. Since they didn’t mix in booming timpani or a roaring engine, they could focus the audience on details: the clanking of nearby mailboxes, the hiss of the car engine overheating, a dog barking somewhere in the distance.

Spielberg says he was inspired by actual accounts of UFO sightings, which described ships flying overhead in total silence. And with a classic scene like this, some of the sounds come from the theater: Spielberg identifies the exact moment when the real soundtrack will be provided by the audience’s reaction.

Coeficiente Gini

Measuring Inequality

A second definition of welfare which is often considered in analysis is that of ‘relative’ poverty, defined as having little in a specific dimension compared to other members of society. This concept is based on the idea that the way individuals or households perceive their position in society is an important aspect of their welfare. To a certain extent, the use of a relative poverty line in the previous sections does capture this dimension of welfare by classifying as ‘poor’ those who have less than some societal norm. The overall level of inequality in a country, region or population group – and more generally the distribution of consumption, income or other attributes – is also in itself an important dimension of welfare in that group. Inequality measures can be calculated for any distribution—not just for consumption, income or other monetary variables, but also for land and other continuous and cardinal variables. Some commonly used measures are presented in Technical Note: Inequality Measures and their Decompositions. For a discussion of the properties and qualities of alternative measures, please consult Inequality: Methods and Tools (177kb PDF), which presents the five key axioms which inequality are usually required to meet. The paper also discusses the calculation of standard errors for usual measures, which is useful for comparisons between estimates of inequality for different distributions. Gini-coefficient of inequality: This is the most commonly used measure of inequality. The coefficient varies between 0, which reflects complete equality and 1, which indicates complete inequality (one person has all the income or consumption, all others have none). Graphically, the Gini coefficient can be easily represented by the area between the Lorenz curve and the line of equality. On the figure to the right, the Lorenz curve maps the cumulative income share on the vertical axis against the distribution of the population on the horizontal axis. In this example, 40 percent of the population obtains around 20 percent of total income. If each individual had the same income, or total equality, the income distribution curve would be the straight line in the graph – the line of total equality. The Gini coefficient is calculated as the area A divided by the sum of areas A and B. If income is distributed completely equally, then the Lorenz curve and the line of total equality are merged and the Gini coefficient is zero. If one individual receives all the income, the Lorenz curve would pass through the points (0,0), (100,0) and (100,100), and the surfaces A and B would be similar, leading to a value of one for the Gini-coefficient. It is sometimes argued that one of the disadvantages of the Gini coefficient is that it is not additive across groups,  i.e. the total Gini of a society is not equal to the sum of the Ginis for its sub-groups. Theil-index: While less commonly used than the Gini coefficient, the Theil-index of inequality has the advantage of being additive across different subgroups or regions in the country. The Theil index, however, does not have a straightforward representation and lacks the appealing interpretation of the Gini coefficient. The Theil index is part of a larger family of measures referred to as the General Entropy class. Decile dispersion ratio: Also sometimes used is the decile dispersion ratio, which presents the ratio of the average consumption or income of the richest 10 percent of the population divided by the average income of the bottom 10 percent. This ratio can also be calculated for other percentiles (for instance, dividing the average consumption of the richest 5 percent – the 95th percentile – by that of the poorest 5 percent – the 5th percentile). This ratio is readily interpretable, by expressing the income of the rich as multiples of that of the poor. Share of income/consumption of the poorest x%: A disadvantage of both the Gini coefficients and the Theil indices is that they vary when the distribution varies, no matter if the change occurs at the top or at the bottom or in the middle (any transfer of income between two individuals has an impact on the indices, irrespective of whether it takes place among the rich, among the poor or between the rich and the poor). If a society is most concerned about the share of income of the people at the bottom, a better indicator may be a direct measure, such as the share of income that goes to the poorest 10 or 20 percent. Such a measure would not vary, for example, with changes in tax rates resulting in less disposable income for the top 20 percent at the advantage of the middle class rather than the poor. It is possible that different measures will rank the same set of distributions in different ways, because of their differing sensitivity to incomes in different parts of the distribution. When rankings are ambiguous, the alternative method of stochastic dominance can be applied. The attached paper Inequality: Methods and Tools (177kb PDF) discusses a type of stochastic dominance which can be used for unambiguous comparisons of inequality across distributions: the mean-normalized second-order dominance, or Lorenz dominance.

http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTPOVERTY/EXTPA/0,,contentMDK:20238991~menuPK:492138~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:430367,00.html

Macau

Macau: um sorvedouro

 Isidoro Guimarães

   Poucos o recordam e até em Macau mal lhe sobrou uma rua, para os lados do velho Porto Interior, mas foi o governador Isidoro Guimarães quem, nos idos das décadas de 50 e 60 do século XIX, licenciou o jogo para sustentar o orçamento da Província de Macau, Timor e Solor.

   Face à usurpação colonial de Hong Kong pelo Reino Unido, em 1842, a cidade do Santo Nome de Deus em vias de perder seus tratos comerciais no sul da China encontrou pela mão do futuro Visconde da Praia Grande de Macau uma nova vocação.

   Da exploração pelos bandos tradicionais do submundo chinês, as tríades, até ao monopólio firmado com Stanley Ho em 1962, passando pela entrada em 2002 de competidores de Las Vegas, o jogo foi sempre - a par de contrabandos diversos, caso do auge do tráfico de ouro, após a guerra no Pacífico - a razão de ser de Macau onde à fruste administração portuguesa sucedeu a soberania de Pequim.

                                      O esplendor do jogo

   Regulamentar o jogo, velho vício chinês, encontrou logo na legislação de Isidoro Guimarães a sua justificação como fonte de receitas para projectos sociais e financiamento de infra-estruturas, e tal foi a lógica que levou das primeiras salas licenciadas no Porto Interior e na Rua da Felicidade aos esplendores dos actuais omnipresentes casinos que, superando desde 2006 as receitas de Las Vegas, contribuem para mais de 80% do orçamento da Região Administrativa Especial da República Popular da China, estabelecida em 1999.

    Hoje, como desde os anos 60 do século pretérito, os casinos são a imagem de marca de Macau e qualquer miragem de diversificação económica, fantasiada pelos últimos governadores portugueses e outra vez reiterada pelo novel hierarca da Região, Chui Sai Hon, com beneplácito do presidente chinês Hu Jintao, perde-se insane.

    Macau com pouco mais de 28 quilómetros quadrados no eixo da grande província de Guangdong, face aos primores de Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Zhuhai e Cantão, não apresenta quaisquer vantagens competitivas.

   Raramente a especificidade de Macau foi potenciada, até por falta de quadros qualificados no funcionalismo público e escassez de oferta cultural, mas, mesmo a melhor das estratégias de promoção nunca poderia escapar à míngua do que ver.

   Bastam, em regra, 24 horas para saciar um turista com o património arquitectural e culinário herdado das tradições luso-malaio-chinesas e impera a visita de curta duração visando os casinos.

   Mais de metade dos visitantes de Macau, rondando quase dois milhões de entradas por mês, é oriunda da República Popular da China, que permitiu as visitas individuais ao seus cidadãos em 2003, e todos embicam aos casinos.

   O fluxo de perdedores no jogo varia consoante as autorizações de entradas permitidas por Pequim e o volume de receitas segue de perto os altos e baixos da República Popular, sobretudo na vizinha província de Guangdong, pelo que os lucros dos casinos flutuam em função das entradas de jogadores da China.

   A propaganda sugere que três mil milhões de apostadores asiáticos rondam por ali sôfregos por casinos num arco de cinco horas de voo, mas basta o mercado chinês que, subsidiariamente, é capaz de sustentar centros de jogo em Singapura, Coreia do Sul ou Camboja, para não deixar esgotar o maná de Macau.

                                           Lavar dinheiro

   E, no entanto, sobra um magno problema.

   Nem tem a ver com a apatia política de uma população de pouco mais de meio milhão pessoas, maioritamente vinda da China, sequer, ainda, com reivindicações de justificada representação política por parte de grupos minoritários, clamando contra a crescente desigualdade social.

   A representação política (de mediocridade assombrosa, conforme ilustram os debates ignaros na Assembleia Legislativa) deixa necessariamente de fora uma série de reivindicações sociais, apesar da crescente contestação ao emprego de emigrantes não-qualificados da China (cerca de 80 mil, segundo dados oficiais).

   Os abusos perenes de corrupção (de que os governadores português, por sinal, nunca se penitenciaram) atingiram o auge no caso de um antigo governante, Ao Man Long, que, na tutela das Obras Públicas e Transportes, superou ao longo de sete anos abusos velhos, apropriando-se de quase 100 milhões de euros, até ter sido condenado em 2008 a 27 anos de prisão.

   Ao Man Long e quatro familiares acabaram vítimas exemplares e solitárias de um sistema enraizado de compadrio e a prová-lo está a permanência da ex-auditora do governo, Fátima Choi, e do antigo Comissário Contra a Corrupção, Cheong U, em cargos governamentais com Chui Sai On, apesar de terem falhado em toda a linha no exercício das suas funções no executivo de Edmund Ho.

   Nada disto importa sobremaneira a um Partido Comunista que, por exemplo, ainda no ano passado, deu luz verde a 18 anos de cadeia para o antigo homem forte de Xangai, Chen Liangyu, por razões (corrupção, tráfico de influências, etc.) que qualquer residente de Macau facilmente compreenderia.

   A maior dúvida que sobra tem a ver com a forma como os dirigentes chineses irão nos próximos tempos lidar com os esquemas de lavagem de dinheiro que empresas e particulares da República Popular praticam assiduamente nos casinos de Macau quando se sabe que 90% dos grandes apostadores nos casinos são oriundos da China.

   A fuga e a fraude via Macau terão necessariamente de encontrar os seus limites.

   As autoridades de Pequim anunciaram este mês ter recuperado 1 500 milhões de dólares desviados só no último semestre por funcionários públicos e não é segredo para ninguém que parte significativa desse dinheiro seria cedo ou tarde reciclada através de Macau.

   Jogar os yuans chineses para os trocar em dólares de Hong Kong ou patacas, livremente convertíveis, é coisa que se nota em excesso e não pode durar toda a vida.

Jornal de Negócios
24 Dezembro

http://maneatsemper.blogspot.pt/2012/08/macau-um-sorvedouro.html

 

 

 

Rolling the Dice in Macau

http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=565

October 9, 2012

It has been almost a decade now since China regained control of Macau, but the city’s present and future crops up in news coverage much less than Hong Kong, another reclaimed colony. We’re delighted, then, to be able to run this piece about Macau from someone who has been spending time there, meditating on not only whether or not Macau is democratizing but also how Macau’s relationship to the mainland and the world is changing its economy and society. For those interested in background information on Macau, see the reading list that follows the piece. By Dustin Wright
Sitting in a hip dessert shop recently, I asked three University of Macau undergraduates, all Macau natives, what they thought about Macau’s new Chief Executive-elect, Fernando Chui. He is only the second person to hold the post since the Portuguese handover in 1999.
“I don’t really think about it,” one told me. “Young people here don’t really think about who is in the government.” The two others nodded in agreement. “Connections are the most important thing to succeed in Macau. Anyone here who is rich was born rich.”
Such apathy can be understood, given that Chui’s appointment as the new head of Macau was decided by a 300-member “election committee” comprised of the city’s elite, many of whom have strong ties to PRC officials. Chui, the former Secretary of Social Affairs and Culture and holder of college degrees from the United States, including a PhD in Public Health from the University of Oklahoma, will be officially sworn in this December. The victory of his unopposed election was a foregone conclusion, emphasized by the fact that The Macau Daily lead with a headline declaring Chui’s victory before the vote actually took place. An online poll at the English language MacauNews.com showed that 44 percent of respondents felt that Chui’s top priority should be combating public corruption, while only 2.3 percent stressed the importance for political reforms. This strong displeasure towards corruption was likely exacerbated by a recent high-profile case involving a former official in Macau, now serving 28 years in prison.
However, not everyone is apathetic toward the election process. On election day, pro-democracy legislators unveiled banners and staged a protest in front of the iconic façade of St. Paul’s ruins, calling for universal suffrage by 2019. The rally hinted at the fact that political (and economic) disparities are just as Macanese as Portuguese egg tarts.
As with the changing of the guard in the Chief Executive’s office, the gaming sector might also be in a state of transition. For nearly four decades, the casino industry has been heavily influenced by one man, the philoprogenitive Stanley Ho, whose failing health has raised speculation as to who will make up (and benefit from) Macau’s next generation of corporatists.
All of this begs the question: What is the Macau that Chui will soon be running?
Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR) is a city of variations, scattered with amalgamations, and permeated with assimilations. Since the sixteenth century, Macau’s seemingly effortless blending of cultures has impressed and marveled those who visited and inhabited this Portuguese outpost on the Pearl River Delta. “Culturally,” writes Austin Coates, “there has never been anything like Macao, where so much of China and so much of Europe are enshrined in one small place.”[1] Wang Zeng Yang, President of the Cultural Institute of Macau, remarked that this is a city “where different cultures are treated not as mere rituals, but instead, as truly symbiotic, as totally complimentary,” and that “even tourists in Taiwan advise their friends if they wish to know Europe but do not want to take long trips, to visit Macau, to know how it feels to be in a European city.”[2] At a very cosmopolitan and Iberian dinnertime of 10:00 p.m., you might find yourself dining on stewed bacalhau (Portuguese salted fish) and African chicken. At the same restaurant the previous night, it was mapo tofu, steamed Chinese broccoli drowned in oyster sauce, and eggplant sautéed in oil and chilies, washed down with milk tea.
Just as identity and cuisine are in constant motion in Macau, so is the movement of capital. Since the handover of Macau back to Chinese rule a decade ago, and the relaxation of monopolistic gaming licenses in 2002, foreign casino operators have set up shop at a dizzying pace. Macau peninsula—along with the islands of Taipa and Coloane—makes up only 29 square kilometers and often goes unnoticed when compared to the larger Hong Kong SAR. However, in terms of generating wealth, size doesn’t matter: Las Vegas is 7.5 times bigger than Macau, yet more money is generated in the SAR than Sin City.
Climbing up the hill to Guia Fortress, one of the many historical sites that pepper the peninsula, one can see much of Macau spread out below. Looking south, the Sands Macao Hotel, which is responsible for fully two thirds of Las Vegas Sands Corp.’s profit, fights for elbow room with a bevy of Chinese and foreign-owned casinos. Large condominium complexes are still being built within sight, though at a slower pace than this time last year. Fisherman’s Wharf, a Disneylandesque amusement park built in the images of famous landmarks and cities, including a mock Coliseum, sits atop 111,500 square meters of concrete along the waterfront. Even Isidoro Francisco Guimarães, governor of Macau from 1851 to 1863 and the first to introduce licensed gambling, could hardly have imagined the garishness of the city today.
To the west, towards the central business district of Macau, one can see the immense and lotus-shaped Grand Lisboa rising from a sea of comparatively diminutive casinos, along with banks, shopping malls, pastel-colored cathedrals, and apartment blocks. Nearby, a towering needle, complete with a rotating restaurant and bar, confirms Macau’s ascension as a tourist haven. Wynn Macau is visible, a casino as much as a high-end shopping bonanza for tourists, most of whom come from mainland China. An American expat working in Macau told me about his experience watching a man, who was half-naked and sweating profusely, struggle to fit into a shirt while standing in the middle of Wynn’s Giorgio Armani store. I asked why the store personnel would allow such behavior, to which the expat, shocked by my ignorance, replied without pause, “Because he had money.” (When Henry Kissinger came to Macau a few months ago to speak at Macao Polytechnic University, his old friend, Steve Wynn, made sure to come to listen and, perhaps, comped the former Secretary of State’s room at the Wynn Macau.)
On a clear day you can catch a glimpse of a smattering of islands to the east, the largest of which is Lantau, part of Hong Kong SAR, while to the north is the city of Zhuhai, gateway to Guangdong Province and mainland China, visible from much of Macau. Travelling between the SARs and the mainland ensures one’s passport is stamped with the frequency of a pre-EU jaunt through Europe.
It’s a small city, yes, but the numbers are big. Macau’s population is roughly 560,000, nearly identical to that of Las Vegas. With such a small land area, Macau is one of the mostly densely populated places on earth. Government figures indicate that 23 million people visited Macau in 2008 and helped the city generate nearly $22 billion in GDP. With so many visitors spending so much money, Macau is a city that truly never sleeps.
The massive expansion of Macau’s gaming industry dovetailed with the global real estate gorge of the last decade, giving way to a bevy of expensive condominium projects, followed by the subsequent drop in market prices late last year. In Senado Square, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a lodestone for tourists, the young professionals who bought many of those condos bark into Blackberries and loosen their European-brand ties, while tourist families vie for space to take their portraits in front of the picturesque St. Dominic’s Church. Macau’s overall standard of living is quite high, with a quality-of-life index comparable to Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
However, even with the huge influx of capital (or because of it), economic inequality is prevalent. Not far away from Senado Square, in an area known as Fátima Parish, lies a rusted and mosquito-infested slum, where elderly women can be seen washing dishes at a communal spigot. It isn’t a unique example of poverty in greater China, but it’s proximity to the corporatist wealth of the casinos makes the disparity all the more egregious. Inoperable cars sit on blocks as they are slowly parted out, while above, a messy labyrinth of wires indicates that much of electricity that people can access in this area is pirated. It is a squatter community of mostly mainland Chinese immigrants, some of whom entered Macau illegally but were later granted legal status. Until 1979, Chinese mainlanders could enter Macau without restriction, though it was illegal for them to do so under PRC law. Portuguese administrators tacitly endorsed the immigration of Chinese mainlanders, eager to have a ready supply of cheap labor that could be easily repatriated once their labor had been exploited.

Fatima Parish. Photo by Erica Hashiba.
The size of the slum has been halved since 1991, mostly through government campaigns to tear down the shacks and build high-rise housing and commercial buildings, evicting many of the squatters once their labor had been utilized to build the more expensive new real estate. Today, these towers loom over the shacks of corrugated tin that remain. Even though the slum is physically smaller and stronger immigration laws have made it more difficult for mainlanders to come to Macau, squatters are just as essential for today’s labor demands as they were twenty years ago. Sociologist D.Y. Yuan, a longtime researcher of Macau’s immigrant community, writes that, “Squatters have continuously provided a cheap source of labor, helping Macau to remain competitive in the international trade market.”[3] Last year’s census indicates that there was an increase of 8.2 percent in the number of “non-resident workers,” making up a population of over 92,000, many of whom have less than a junior high school education. Most of these workers are not salaried staff in the casinos (jobs which can require expensive training) but are instead employed in construction and more vulnerable to the global recession. When the economic crisis hit last fall, many ambitious building projects were shuttered and thousands in the construction industry lost their jobs. For those lucky enough to have kept their jobs in the casinos, gaming is still profitable, even though the number of tourists has decreased (due in part to travel restrictions by Beijing and the curtailing of gambling by PRC officials). Direct gaming tax revenue doubled from 2006 to 2008 to nearly $5 billion and many of the Macau government’s 20,000 employees can expect a pay raise this year. For the slums in Fátima Parish, things will likely remain the same.

The hotel Lan Kwai Fong. Photo by Erica Hashiba.
It remains to be seen whether Chief Executive-elect Chui will be able to oversee the level of prosperity heralded during the last decade, or indeed whether Macau can remain a global gambling Mecca. For some, surely, things could be worse. Down the street from my apartment, I recently happened upon the opening party for a new hotel. On the street where I stood, looking rather pathetic with my mouth agape, throngs of people queued for admittance, while glittery VIP couples seemed to prance in slow motion as they made their way to the front of the line. Up above us, the silhouettes of a dozen voluptuous women—paid performers—gyrated in the windows of the new hotel. A powerful sound system blasted Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” throughout the neighborhood, inviting all of Macau to find “someone to hear your prayers, someone who cares.” This fall, Dustin Wright will begin his doctoral studies in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Recommended readings on Macau: Lucky for us, Hong Kong University Press just republished many of Austin Coates’ informative and immensely enjoyable books on Macau: City of Broken Promises (fiction), A Macao Narrative, and Macao and the British: 1637-1842 Prelude to Hong Kong.
For a general background on Macau, check out Jonathan Porter’s Macau : The Imaginary City : Culture and Society, 1577 to Present (Westview Press, 1999).
Cathryn H. Clayton, Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii and a prominent scholar on Macau, has written the forthcoming Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness (Harvard University Press, 2009).
Atlantic correspondent James Fallows’ take on Macau.
César Guillén Nuñez, art historian and Research Fellow at the Macau-based Ricci Institute, recently wrote a wonderful book entitled, Macao’s Church of Saint Paul: A Glimmer of the Baroque in China (Hong Kong University Press, 2009).

[1] Austin Coates, A Macau Narrative (Hong Kong: Heinemann Education Books [Asia] Ltd, 1978), p. 105.
[2] Wang Zeng Yang, “Unveiling a Cultural Dialogue,” in Lucy M. Cohen and Iêda Siquera Wiarda (eds.), Macau: Cultural Dialogue Towards a New Millennium (USA: Xlibris Corporation, 2004), p. 17.
[3] D. Y. Yuan, Chinese Immigration and Emigration: A Population Study of Macau (University of Macau, 2000), p. 11.

http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=565

História ONU

http://www.unhistoryproject.org/

The website provides comprehensive guides to physical and online sources on the United Nations. It also collates many of the research guides on the United Nations that already exist. In addition, leading scholars on the UN have written about their experiences working in UN archives and discuss further research possibilities.
The website offers a set of teaching materials for UN history. There are annotated bibliographies, timelines, and featured sources on thirteen major themes of UN history. There are resources from a course taught on the global history of the UN at Harvard in spring 2011 as well as a compilation of other syllabi on UN topics.

Do the dead outnumber the living?

February 2012

Do the dead outnumber the living?
By Wesley Stephenson BBC News

The population of the planet reached seven billion in October, according to the United Nations. But what's the figure for all those who have lived before us?

It is often said that there are more people alive today than have ever lived - and this "fact" has raised its head again since the UN announcement about the planet's population reaching a new high.
The idea helps fuel fears that the population is expanding too fast.
It is true that if you delve back into the mists of time, the population of Earth was tiny in comparison to today and logically it might seem plausible that the living outnumber the dead.
It is agreed by most demographers that the UN figure for the number alive today is reasonably accurate. The problem is, how do you calculate how many have ever lived, and where do you start?
One group to have done the work is the Population Reference Bureau in Washington.
Wendy Baldwin from the Bureau says that the normal starting point is when Homo sapiens first walked the earth, about 50,000 years ago.
So you have a starting point and an end figure but it's the time in between that causes the problems. "For 99% of that time there is no data," she says.

This means experts have to make an educated guess.

In the 20th Century, the world's birth rate dropped from 40 births per 1,000 people per year to just 31 in 1995, and today it is only 23.
But long ago, humans needed a reproduction rate of about 80 births per 1,000 people per year in order to survive, Wendy Baldwin says, because people didn't live so long and far fewer of those born had children.
"Today, life expectancy is about 75-80 [years] and for most of human history that was not the case," she says.
"We have some estimates for the Middle Ages where life expectancy might have been 10-12, which means many people never made it out of childhood.
"Even if you had a lot of births, many of those never lived to actually bear children themselves."
In other words, it would be easy to underestimate the number of people who were born, lived and died, in the earlier part of human history. That estimate of 80 births per 1,000 people per year looks very high by today's standards - but in fact it is conservative, implying "a very slow population growth, much slower than anything we see today".
Added to this educated guess for the early period is much more accurate data from the modern era.

"Once you have written records, once you have censuses, when countries start to collect taxes, you start developing written record," says Wendy Baldwin.

From around 1800, and even a little before that, is where the data becomes much better. "It then becomes plausible to say [around this time] you have a billion people on earth."
This written record means that you can be pretty confident about the final figure for the number of people who have ever lived, she explains.
Population growth has mostly happened in the modern period, she says, when records were kept, so if estimates for the early period are slightly out, this will not drastically change the overall ratio of "ever lived" to "living".
So what are the figures? There are currently seven billion people alive today and the Population Reference Bureau estimates that about 107 billion people have ever lived.
This means that we are nowhere near close to having more alive than dead. In fact, there are 15 dead people for every person living. We surpassed seven billion dead way back between 8000BC and AD1.

 Fans of science fiction may be reaching for their copies of Arthur C Clarke's classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, at this point.

In that book, he makes the assertion: "Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living."
But Ms Baldwin points out he was not wrong.
"He was making his statement in 1968. There were maybe 3.5 billion people currently living on earth so if you use our method, that would be one living person to 29 dead."
And will we ever reach a point where there are more alive than dead?
This would imply a very high rate of population growth.
"Could we imagine a carrying capacity of the Earth of 100-150 billion? I find that quite unimaginable."

How many people have ever lived?
Year	Population	Births / 1,000	Births since previous date
Source: Population Reference Bureau estimates
50,000BC	2	-	-
8,000BC	5,000,000	80	1,137,789,769
AD1	300,000,000	80	46,025,332,354
1200	450,000,000	60	26,591,343,000
1650	500,000,000	60	12,782,002,453
1750	795,000,000	50	3,171,931,513
1850	1,265,000,000	40	4,046,240,009
1900	1,656,000,000	40	2,900,237,856
1950	2,516,000,000	31-38	3,390,198,215
1995	5,760,000,000	31	5,427,305,000
2011	6,215,000,000	23	2,130,327,622
Number who have ever lived: 107,602,707,791

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16870579



http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx

Court upholds German Catholic Church membership tax

October 5, 2012

German Catholic Church Links Tax to the Sacraments

By MELISSA EDDY

BERLIN — It is a paradox of modern Germany that church and state remain so intimately tied. That bond persists more and more awkwardly, it seems, as the church’s relationship with followers continues to fray amid growing secularization.

Last week one of Germany’s highest courts rankled Catholic bishops by ruling that the state recognized the right of Catholics to leave the church — and therefore avoid paying a tax that is used to support religious institutions. The court ruled it was a matter of religious freedom, while religious leaders saw the decision as yet another threat to their influence on modern German society.

With its ruling the court also dodged the thorny issue of what happens when a parishioner formally quits the church, stops paying taxes, but then wants to attend services anyway. The court said that, too, was a matter of religious freedom, a decision that so rankled religious leaders fearful of losing a lucrative revenue stream that they made clear, right away, that taxes are the price for participation in the church’s most sacred rituals: no payments, no sacraments.

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference in Germany issued a crystal clear, uncompromising edict, endorsed by the Vatican. It detailed that a member who refuses to pay taxes will no longer be allowed to receive communion or make confession, to serve as godparents or to hold any office in the church. Those who leave can also be refused a Christian burial, unless they “give some sign of repentance,” it read.

“Whoever declares they are leaving the church before official authorities, for whatever reason, impinges on their responsibility to safeguard the community of the church, and against their responsibility to provide financial support to allow the church to fulfill its work” before their death, it read.

The tussle highlighted the long-established but increasingly troubled symbiosis between church and state in Europe that, repeated polls have shown, grows more secular-minded as each generation moves further away from the church. Like many European countries, Germany’s churches are independent but function in partnership with the state, which collects taxes from members of established religions and then funnels the revenues back to the religious institutions, for a fee, in keeping with a 19th-century agreement following abolishment of an official state church.

Income from church taxes in Germany amounted to about $6.3 billion for the Roman Catholic Church in 2011, and $5.5 billion for the Protestant, mostly Lutheran, churches in 2010, official statistics show. The money goes to support hospitals, schools, day care and myriad other social services, but a sizable amount of the Catholic money is also channeled to the Vatican.

The German church tax — which is 8 to 9 percent of the annual income tax — is so steep, however, that many people formally quit the church to avoid paying, while nevertheless remaining active in their faith. That is what is angering Catholic Church officials.

To many faithful, the court ruling validated that choice, and the edict from the Catholic Bishops’ Conference amounted to a sharp response by church leaders against the government’s increasingly aggressive secularism taking root in society. They see it threatening the future of the religious institutions upon which Germany’s modern democracy was founded.

Unlike the United States, where politicians attend prayer breakfasts, and service as an altar boy is cast as a solid political credential, discussion of faith plays little role in German public discourse. Although Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party is called the Christian Democrats, and her father was a minister, the outward emphasis is far more on democracy than on Christianity.

The contrast could be seen starkly at a recent gala in Berlin honoring 30 years since the former leader Helmut Kohl’s first term as chancellor. Of a dozen international speakers, only three sought God’s blessing for Germany. Two were the American speakers, the elder George Bush and Philip D. Murphy, the ambassador to Germany. The other was a Catholic priest.

Even so, it is the United States, where churches are tax exempt, that prides itself on a constitutional separation between church and state, while most European governments continue to support their churches through a variety of means.

In Belgium, Greece and Norway, churches are financed by the state. Churches in Austria, Switzerland and Sweden all use the state to collect taxes from members, but the contributions are either predetermined amounts or, compared with Germany, a more modest 1 to 2 percent of the annual assessed income tax. Spain and Italy allow congregants to decide whether they would like a percentage of their income to flow to religious organizations or be earmarked for civic projects.

In Germany, roughly a third of its 82 million people are Roman Catholics, and about the same number belong to the country’s Protestant churches. All of these members, as well as the estimated 120,000 Jews, pay taxes to the state. Muslim organizations rely on donations or support from outside sources, often based in countries abroad.

Critics charge that the German bishops’ decree denying sacraments to tax dodgers was driven more by greed than necessity, pointing out that belonging to a congregation in neighboring countries like the Netherlands or France is based on tithes, not a predetermined charge levied by the government.

Indeed, the tax in Germany is blamed in part for driving about three million members from the ranks of the Roman Catholic Church over the past two decades, as disgruntled parishioners decided the payments were better spent on something else.

Norbert Lüdecke, a professor of canon law at Bonn University, said that while every disobedient Catholic is to be punished based on the sin committed, the bishops’ decree effectively placed refusal to pay church taxes nearly on par with the most severe offenses in the church.

“Now refusing to pay taxes is considered an offense only slightly less bad than denial that Jesus Christ is the son of God,” Mr. Lüdecke said. “While at the same time, there is no specific punishment for other offenses, such as, for example, the sexual abuse of minors by clerics.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/06/world/europe/german-church-ties-tax-to-sacraments-after-court-ruling.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print

 

BBC

26 September 2012

 

Court upholds German Catholic Church membership tax

 

Germany's Roman Catholics can only remain part of the Church if they pay a membership tax, a court has ruled.

All Germans who are officially registered as Catholics, Protestants or Jews pay a religious tax, worth an extra 8-9% of their income tax bill.

This had been challenged by a retired law professor who said he wanted to remain a Catholic but not pay the tax.

Last week, a new bishops' decree warned that anyone not paying the tax would be denied the right to religious rites.

The German church levy was introduced in 1803 in compensation for the nationalisation of religious property.

In 2011, the Catholic Church received 5bn euros (£4bn; $6.4bn) and the Protestant Church 4.5bn euros from taxpayers, each adding up to the bulk of the churches' income, the BBC's Berlin correspondent Stephen Evans said.

He added that this arrangement, whereby the state collects taxes on behalf of religious groups and then reimburses them, was unusual in Western secular societies.

Alarm over decline

Hartmut Zapp, a retired professor of church law, filed a legal challenge in 2007, arguing that under Catholic doctrine, Church membership was determined by a person's beliefs and not by a financial relationship.

Tax on Germany's Christians

• 25 million Catholics - tax worth 5bn euros (2011)
• 24 million Protestants - tax worth 4.5bn euros
• German population 82 million

The Freiburg University academic said he wanted to continue praying and receiving Holy Communion without paying the religious levy.

Judges at the Leipzig Federal Administrative Court, however, disagreed with Prof Zapp and ruled that there could not be partial Church membership.

Their verdict follows a new bishops' decree issued last week, according to which anyone failing to pay the tax will no longer have the right to Holy Communion and religious burial.

Already alarmed by declining congregation numbers, the bishops were also pushed into action by Mr Zapp's legal challenge.

They said refusal to pay Church tax should be seen as a serious act against the community.

Catholics make up around 30% of Germany's population but the number of congregants leaving the church swelled to 181,000 in 2010, with the increase blamed on revelations of sexual abuse by German priests.

"This decree makes clear that one cannot partly leave the Church," Germany's bishops' conference said last week, in a decision endorsed by the Vatican.

'Wrong signal'

Unless they pay the religious tax, Catholics will no longer be allowed receive sacraments, except before death, or work in the church and its schools or hospitals.

Without a "sign of repentance before death, a religious burial can be refused", the decree states. Opting out of the tax would also bar people from acting as godparents to Catholic children.

"This decree at this moment of time is really the wrong signal by the German bishops who know that the Catholic church is in a deep crisis," Christian Weisner from the grassroots Catholic campaign group We Are Church told the BBC.

But a priest from Mannheim in south-western Germany, Father Lukas Glocker, said the tax was used to do essential good works.

"With kindergarten, with homes for elderly or unemployed, we've got really good things so I know we need the tax to help the German country to do good things."

While the decree severely limits active participation in the German Catholic Church, it does hold out some hope for anyone considering a return to the fold.

Until now, any German Catholic who stopped payment faced eventual excommunication. Although the measures laid out in the decree are similar to excommunication from the church, German observers say the word is carefully avoided in the decree.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19737983

COBERTURA NACIONAL

A influência da estupidez

Por Dirceu Martins Pio em 02/10/2012 na edição nº 714

A degola que a grande mídia perpetrou em suas antigas estruturas de cobertura nacional jamais poderá ser vista como sensata e racional. Foi provocada, sem qualquer dúvida, por influência da estupidez. Quem cortou sucursais e correspondentes nestes últimos 20 anos era péssimo em visão estratégica, ruim de visão de futuro e um desastre em cálculos econômicos e financeiros. Em resumo, era mesmo um estúpido.

A desativação dessas estruturas – fulminante em alguns casos, lenta e gradual em outros – teve início no começo dos anos 1990, quando já se prenunciavam no Brasil as grandes transformações desencadeadas pelo desenvolvimento das novas e revolucionárias tecnologias de informação. A grande mídia brasileira entrava em crise. Cada qual viveu suas próprias circunstâncias. Umas se endividaram para investir em telefonia celular; outras por investir em internet e outras mais em função de planos mirabolantes em TV fechada. A chamada “economia de custos”, traduzida por redução atrás de redução da folha de pagamento, virou rotina nas empresas de mídia. As estruturas de cobertura nacional foram decepadas e ninguém parou para analisar os benefícios que elas traziam e poderiam trazer às organizações. Foi como matar a galinha de ovos de ouro.

O Grupo Estado de S.Paulo, por exemplo, tinha uma rede de sucursais e de correspondentes de primeira linha, esculpida que foi, ao longo do tempo, por Raul Bastos. Até o início dos anos 1990, essa rede oferecia material de qualidade para que o Grupo introduzisse diferenciais relevantes em seus dois jornais (Estado de S.Paulo e Jornal da Tarde); abastecia a Agência Estado, que começava a faturar alto com a venda de informações tanto para a mídia (reprodução simultânea com os jornais do grupo) como para mesas financeiras (consumo final); colaborava com a rádio Eldorado (pertencente ao grupo), que se posicionava em jornalismo de ótima qualidade; servia ainda como balcão de publicidade regional, que eram lucrativos porque o mercado de publicidade local respondia bem ao volume de informações regionais que os dois grandes jornais paulistas publicavam.

Noticiário concentrado

Quem decepou a estrutura, olhou apenas para o orçamento de uma das unidades do grupo (Estado de S. Paulo) e enxergou a rede como centro de custos, e não por sua excepcional condição de provedora de receitas (na metade da década de 1990, as receitas anuais obtidas pela Agência Estado com a venda de informações apenas para a mídia nacional ultrapassavam os R$ 10 milhões, ou seja, eram quase o dobro dos “custos” eliminados). Quer dizer, por estupidez, enxergou a árvore e não conseguiu enxergar a floresta.
A mutilação dessas estruturas ainda reverbera forte sobre a economia das grandes empresas de mídia. Perderam posição nos mercados regionais dinâmicos (interior Paulista, Paraná, Triângulo Mineiro para ficarmos em três exemplos eloquentes), perderam força institucional, perderam influência e perderam – o que tem gravidade maior – as condições básicas para concorrer no mercado de informações nos meios digitais. Não vai ser fácil para os grandes jornais brasileiros emular o bem sucedido programa de venda de informações na internet produzido pelo New York Times.

O Brasil que descentralizou seu desenvolvimento ficou descoberto pelos grandes jornais, cujo noticiário hoje está superconcentrado no triângulo São Paulo-Rio-Brasília. Eles precisam – e com urgência – resgatar essa cobertura, mas não sabem disso e não pensam nisso. A tiragem dos jornais de economia e negócios – Valor Econômico, Brasil Econômico – também não cresce talvez porque sua cobertura é restrita aos eixos tradicionais de desenvolvimento. A notícia que importa – oportunidades de trabalho, de negócio, novos investimentos, o andamento das obras governamentais, o desenho de um novo país – já está também fora desses eixos.

De costas viradas

Alguns espaços da internet, como o do portal do Google, tentam apresentar uma cobertura de Brasil via acordos com jornais regionais. Não é a mesma cobertura que o Brasil já teve via rede de sucursais e correspondentes dos grandes jornais. A hierarquia que um jornal regional estabelece sobre a informação é diferente. O jornal regional tem de perseguir o noticiário local pelo que possui, às vezes, de mais provinciano. Sucursais e correspondentes dos grandes jornais davam cobertura a fatos regionais que tinham importância nacional.

É claro que uma parte da cobertura nacional é suprida pelas grandes redes de TV, que têm emissoras coligadas e afiliadas bem distribuídas por todo o território nacional. Há que considerarmos que a prioridade de TV não está na relevância dos assuntos, mas em sua capacidade de produzir imagens em movimento. No noticiário nacional, as imagens de um pivete roubando a bolsa de uma mulher nas ruas centrais de Salvador tiram o espaço de uma notícia sobre atrasos numa das grandes obras do PAC. A bem da verdade, a TV continua a ser a mídia da rapidez e da superfície.

“A conta não fecha”, costumam repetir os financistas de plantão a serviço dos grandes jornais a quem pleiteia investir na captação de informações por fora dos antigos eixos da economia. Nos momentos de tempestade, como este, determinado pela pressão do mundo digital sobre os meios tradicionais, o destino da mídia não deveria ficar nas mãos dos financistas, se não tiverem olhos para enxergar os riscos desse caminhar em direção ao futuro sem conteúdos de qualidade e estratégicos. O jornalista empreendedor, com visão moderna de marketing, tem de ser o responsável pela definição da estratégia.
Quem viaja pelo país se espanta com a efervescência econômica de cidades como Jundiaí (SP), Curitiba (PR), Itapema (SC), João Pessoa (PB), Uberlândia (MG) etc., etc. etc. São cidades que hoje ninguém consegue fotografar sem que apareça, ao fundo, a imagem de pelo menos um edifício em construção. É provável que os grandes jornais brasileiros não sobrevivam por estarem de costas viradas para aspectos de tão grande relevância.

***
[Dirceu Martins Pio é ex-diretor da Agência Estado e da Gazeta Mercantil e atual consultor em comunicação corporativa]

http://www.observatoriodaimprensa.com.br/news/view/_ed714_a_influencia_da_estupidez