slides shared

SlideShare now has 10 million presentations rdlj, thank you! Your 4 SlideShares have been viewed a total of 892 times. SlideShare now has over 10 million presentations uploaded. Thanks for playing such a great part in our community! See more Share on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter

Prisoners of the USA and the USSR

US Prison Industrial Complex Versus the Stalinist Gulag

by SEAN on MAY 11, 2013

In a recent column, “Incarceration Nation, Fareed Zakaria claimed that number of people in the United States under “correctional supervision” exceeded that of Stalinist Russia. The assertion comes via Adam Gopnik, who wrote an extensive article on the US prison system in January. “Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America–more than 6 million–,” writes Gopnik, “than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.” Correctional supervision means adults on probation, in jail or prison, and on parole. Zakaria follows Gopnik’s incantation of Stalinism with some horrifying figures:

Is this hyperbole? Here are the facts. The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That’s not just many more than in most other developed countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and Britain–with a rate among the highest–has 153. Even developing countries that are well known for their crime problems have a third of U.S. numbers. Mexico has 208 prisoners per 100,000 citizens, and Brazil has 242. As Robertson pointed out on his TV show, The 700 Club, “We here in America make up 5% of the world’s population but we make up 25% of the [world's] jailed prisoners.”

It is no hyperbole to say that the US prison industrial complex is unacceptable, especially for a country that purports itself the world’s preeminent democracy. But it is hyperbole because placing the US next to Stalinism (and Nazism for that matter) is inherently hyperbolic. The rhetorical move is supposed to provoke an emotional reaction not stimulate critical awareness. And as much as American liberals would like to think that the numbers of bodies ensnared in the US prison industrial complex is as bad, if not worse, than Stalinist Russia, the situation is far more complicated.

Here I don’t mean the quality of the Stalinist system No one is claiming that the US system is worse than Stalin’s forced labor camps. I only mean the quantity of humans in both systems.

The Stalinist penal system was a complex network of punishments and detentions: prisons, noncustodial forced labor, corrective labor camps, forced labor detention (katorga) special settlements, and corrective labor colonies. I won’t go into the meanings and various differences between these. Though experts make clear distinctions between these various units, to the popular mind, they all fall under the general name of gulag. The numbers of people, which also included children, in this penal machine at any given period remains partial. Up 20 percent of the gulag population was released every year, new inmates went in, corpses went out, some even managed to escape. But exactly how many people under Stalin’s correctional supervision is unknown.

Here’s the population of some of these institutions between 1935 and 1940:

According to the straight numbers, the Stalinist system did not exceed the US’ six million during the years of the Great Terror. In 1938, there were 2.7 million people in the “gulag.” But this doesn’t include everyone under Stalinist “correctional supervision.” Therefore it doesn’t take account of prisons and released gulag prisoners who were forced to carry “Form A” which detailed their past crime, prison term, the deprivation of civil rights up to five years, and restricted where they could settle. There were roughly 2 million people released from the gulag between 1934 and 1940 which etches the Stalinist number closer to the United States.

Things change in 1953, the height of the Stalinist gulag. Here are the numbers:

This means an estimated 7.4 million people were under Stalinist correctional supervision 1953, exceeding Zakaria’s and Gopnik’s 6 million for the United States. Again the numbers are probably higher since these numbers don’t include everyone in the Stalinist penal system.

Things get even more complicated when you consider the gulag population per 100,000 citizens.  According to Eugenia Belova and Paul Gregory, the Soviet institutionalized population in 1953 was 2,621,000 or 1,558 per 100.000. When you include special settlements, the numbers jump to 4,301,000 or 2,605 per 100,000. This puts the 760 per 100,000 in the United States into perspective.

The numbers in the United States should produce outcry. No argument there. But caution is required when Stalinist Russia is thrown into the mix, that is, if you want to go beyond rhetoric and emotion.

Other Sources:

Eugenia Belova and Paul Gregory, “Political Economic of Crime and Punishment Under Stalin,” Public Choice, 140, 2009.
Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society, Princeton, 2011.

Latvian censuses: 1913, 1925,1930, 1935, 1970, 1989

Stolen from comments to timbes5 Live Journal

historic Latvian census results
I take a liberty to point to some Latvia's census results:
1) census in Riga and environs in 1913
2) Latvian census of 1925
3) Latvian census of 1930
4) Latvian census of 1935
5) USSR census of 1970 in Latvia
6) USSR census of 1989 in Latvia
Also I'd like to mention Latvian Statistical Atlas of 1938 which was published on 20th anniversary of Latvian independence:

* * *

Numbers of censuses 1913-1935 (4 in 22 years) and then (4 in 30 years) demonstrate an obvious difference between national and communist government. The most important is delay from 1945 to 1959.
+ there are no 1959 and 1979 censuses

The State of Race in America

UN Data in more convenient format

Thanks to Gene Shackman

The UN Terms of Use page says
"All data and metadata provided on UNdata’s website are available free of charge and may be copied freely, duplicated and further distributed provided that UNdata is cited as the reference. "

• http://data.un.org/Host.aspx?Content=UNdataUse
• http://gsociology.icaap.org/data/UN_Population.xlsx    Just population data, by country, 1950 to 2100. The country data also identifies which region it is in.
• http://gsociology.icaap.org/data/UN_BirthDeathMigration.xlsx    Birth, death and net migration data, by country, 1950 to 2100. The country data also identifies which region it is in.
• http://gsociology.icaap.org/data/UN_IMRFertilityRate.xlsx    Infant mortality rate and total fertility rate data, by country, 1950 to 2100. The country data also identifies which region it is in.

Deux ils, deux elles

подробнее

Missing Children in North Caucasus

Window on Eurasia: ‘Missing’ Children in North Caucasus Part of Broader Problem with Russian Census, Moscow Demographer Says

Paul Goble

Staunton, March 29 – Reports that North Caucasus officials have “lost” more than 110,000 children they claimed in 2010 were residents of their republics are part of a broader problem in which officials there and elsewhere falsified census reports in order to suggest that the Russian Federation has “at a minimum” 2.5 million more people than it in fact does.

That is just one disturbing conclusions about the results reported by the 2002 and 2010 Russian censuses which Sergey Zakharov, the director of demographic research at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, offered in the course of an interview posted online yesterday.

Because Russia, like many other countries, does not have a population register as such, Rosstat relies “above all” on data about “demographic events” like births, deaths, and marriages, and on censuses which the constitution requires be conducted every ten years, Zakharov notes. Unfortunately, there are many problems with such data, especially that from censuses.

“It is difficult to call the 2002 and 2010 censuses good,” the demographer continues, adding that he would give them a grade of  “C-Plus.” Among the worse problems manifested in them, he says, are the efforts by officials to report that their regions and republics have more residents than in fact they do in order to obtain larger subventions from Moscow.

Among the worst offenders in this regard are leaders in the North Caucasus, a fact that has been highlighted by official discovery that those leaders have somehow misplaced tens of thousands of children they claimed in 2010. But that region is far from the only one where official malfeasance boosted the overall numbers.

That region, Zakharov says, added one million to the real number, but it was closely followed by over-reporting in Moscow and St. Petersburg.  In those cities, many people refused to “open their doors” to census takers and the original count was quite low.  Then-Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov gave an order to use information contained in administrative registrars.

As a result, “many people were double counted” in the census, first by their census declarations and then by these alternative sources.  In 2002, this happened but it was illegal, Zakharov continues, but for 2010, “Rosstat completely legalized” that approach. “Otherwise, it simply couldn’t overcome the lack of willingness of the population to cooperate.”

Rosstat says that only 15 percent of the reported count in 2010 reflected the use of such alternative enumerations, “but we consider that the real figure is much greater.”

No country has ever conducted a perfect census, Zakharov says, but Russia’s problems with the collection of data mean that officials cannot come up with good policies except by accident because they do not have data about the population on which they can rely.  And both officials and demographers are aware of this.

One way to address it, he continues, is to conduct mini-censuses between those that embrace the entire country. The Soviet Union conducted one of these in 1985, and the Russian Federation plans to do one before the 2020 enumeration, focusing in particular on issues involving reproduction rates.

“The number of people born is increasing” in Russia, Zakharov says. “But whether this means an increase in the birthrate is a big question because it is no secret that Russia is at crest of a demographic wave,” in which the large generation of Russian women born in the 1980s is having children.

Indeed, it seems likely that “the average number” of children per woman “is not changing although the absolute number of births is increasing” because there are more Russian women now in the prime childbearing years of their lives.  When their number declines as it will, Zakharov says, so too will the number of births.

The Russian government’s pro-natalist policies, including “maternal capital,” are unlikely to change that, the demographer says. They may change when women have children but not how many.  To affect the overall number, he says, requires first of all “a struggle with poverty” and even a return to a more rural lifestyle, something which is unlikely to occur.

Russian women have a fertility rate of 1.6 percent, far below the 2.1 children per woman per lifetime needed to keep the population stable as well as below the 2.6 children per married couple per lifetime. Zakharov adds that “no more than 15 percent” of Russian women want three children or more, something far more would need to want to make a difference.

Consequently, expecting as some Russian officials do that they make the three-child family the norm or even more common is “completely utopian,” as the numbers show and as international experience confirms.

Science of Environmental Factors of Health

Unmet need for family planning

Definition: The percent with an unmet need for family planning is the number of women with unmet need for family planning expressed as a percentage of women of reproductive age who are married or in a union. Women with unmet need are those who are fecund and sexually active but are not using any method of contraception, and report not wanting any more children or wanting to delay the birth of their next child.

Calculation:

Based on: Westoff C.F and L. H. Ochoa (1991). Unmet Need and the Demand for Family Planning, DHS Comparative Studies No. 5. Calverton, Maryland: Macro International; and Westoff C.F. and Bankole A. (1995). Unmet need: 1990-1994. DHS Comparative Report No. 16, Calverton, Maryland: Macro International.

German church supports contraception

In Germany there was a public uproar about a woman who after having been raped, was refused treatment and in particular emergency contraception in 2 catholic hospitals in Cologne. Catholic hospitals in Germany receive financial contributions from the State... The doctors were afraid to loose their job if they gave the pill, because some time ago (gestapo style) undercover anti-abortion women had asked for it at catholic hospitals and then denounced the hospitals and doctors to church hierarchy, which then ordered catholic hospitals not to offer emergency contraception.

After this new case got public, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, Archbishop of Cologne (on the right), issued a statement, after consultation with unspecified experts, that "in the light of new scientific evidence" (mainly the study of Kristina Gemzell et al.) the emergency pill did not have an abortifacient effect. Therefore, if the "morning after pill is used with the intention of preventing fertilization, this is in my opinion justifiable," he said. A morning after pill, which would prevent the implantation of fertilized eggs, however, was unacceptable. "It belongs to the nature of new knowledge, that it is often controversial. The Church can only explain the moral principles. The individual doctor in a Catholic institution must then conscientiously weigh his own scientific judgment, whether a drug is preventing fertilization or nidation and so come to a responsible decision."This statement was immediately attacked by anti-abortion organizations and doctors who disagree with the claim, that the morning after pill has no anti-nidation effect.

Now in 2 German States, North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate, the governments have reached an agreement with representatives of the catholic church, that in all relevant hospitals under its ownership, women who have been raped can obtain the pill, and that doctors can freely decide to treat patients.
A petition launched by the family planning organisation Pro Familia, has been tabled with the federal government with more than 50'000 signatures, asking for an obligation for all hospitals in Germany to offer emergency contraception.

The German Bishops' Conference is expected to issue a statement on the matter this week.

source: Anne-Marie Rey
Abortion-information (formerly USPDA)
Grabenstr. 21 3052 Zollikofen / Switzerland
++41 (0)31 911 57 94

US lex fell down

Life expectancy of Americans fell for the first time in 15 years, as the nation’s oldest adults died from heart disease, cancer and respiratory ailments, according to a report by the National Center for Health Statistics.
Based on data from 2008, the latest available, life expectancy in the U.S. fell 36.5 days from 2007 to 77.8 years, according to the report released today. Life expectancy is calculated by taking the death rates from the U.S. population in a specific year and figuring out the average number of years remaining for a person born in 2008.
Children born in 2008 lost a little over a month of expected life. The drop in expectancy was largely the effect of increased mortality among the oldest adults -- those at least 85 -- and a rise in age-related ailments such as Alzheimer’s, high blood pressure, kidney disease, flu and pneumonia, according to the report. Infant mortality declined, as did deaths among all age groups under 85.
“It’s hard for us to tell exactly what’s driving this,” said Arialdi Minino, a statistician at the health center and one of the report’s authors. The number of older people who died “has been going up consistently, and in this particular year, there was a little more of that than we usually see.”
The drop in life expectancy was mostly in the white population, which fell 73 days, while the rate among black women was unchanged at 76.8 years, and rose among black men to an all- time high of 70.2 years. The infant mortality rate fell 2.4 percent to 6.59 deaths for every 1,000 births in 2008.
Possible Effects
“Since the increase in mortality is affecting people who are above age 85, it may just be there are a lot fewer African- Americans who make it to that age,” said Sam Harper, an epidemiologist at McGill University in Montreal.
Declines are uncommon, occurring about once a decade, said Harper. The last decrease in life expectancy was in 1993, he said.
Chronic respiratory diseases, such as asthma and emphysema, displaced stroke as the third-leading cause of death after cancer and heart disease.
Chronic respiratory disease may also have risen because the method of reporting changed at the World Health Organization’s request, said Minino. Until more data come in, it won’t be clear if the decrease in life expectancy is a statistical hiccup, Minino said.
Deaths from stroke dropped, continuing a consistent decline that started in 2000, said Minino. Heart disease also declined.
“Both of these conditions have gone down and both are related to circulatory well-being,” said Minino in a telephone interview.
The health statistics center is part of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
To contact the reporter on this story: Elizabeth Lopatto in New York at elopatto@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reg Gale at rgale5@bloomberg.net.

Famine in Ukraine in the first half of the twentieth century

The Institute of Demography and Social Studies, Institute of the Ukrainian History, Kyiv Taras Shevchenko University, The National University "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy"

International Conference

Famines in Ukraine in the first half of the twentieth century (1921-1923, 1932-1933, 1946-1947): the causes and consequences

20-21 November 2013 Kiev

The purpose of the conference:

Share the results of research of the causes and consequences of famines in Ukraine in the first half of the twentieth century.
Major topis:
- Demographic consequences of the famine in Ukraine
- Historical antecedents and consequences of famine in Ukraine
- Legal estimates
- Social and psychological effects of starvation
- Regional aspects of the famines in the USSR

Working languages: Ukrainian, Russian, English.
To participate in the conference a candidate should send: the application form and an abstract to: CN2013@ukr.net (subj: conference).
Deadline for applications  -  May 31, 2013
Conference proceedings will be published. The organizing committee reserves the right to select papers for publication. Accepted authors will be notified by July 1, 2013.

Current News: http://www.nas.gov.ua (after March 15, 2013)

more details in Russian see here

Elephants, Donkeys, and Religion in America

the site with data is here, codebook and other useful stuff are coming soon
have a look at the discussion of the video

marriage discriminate west and east

Andreas Klarner, University of Rostock

Germany, with its differences between east and west, is a special case regarding the diffusion of more diverse, non-traditional family patterns and different underlying motives and social norms. During socialist times until 1989 non-marital childbearing was socially more accepted in the GDR than in the western, capitalist FRG, and non-marital childbearing was more widespread in the GDR than in the FRG. Even today there are still significant and persisting differences, e.g., couples in eastern Germany are less likely to be married than in western Germany when the first child is born, and they are more likely to remain unmarried after family formation. In order to address different social norms about non-traditional family arrangements we use qualitative focus group discussions. We conducted sixteen focus groups with male and female respondents from different social strata in eastern and western Germany in 2012. Each focus group lasted ca. 90 minutes and respondents discussed issues such as the meaning of marriage, stigmatization of non-marital childbirths etc. In this talk I will present results from these focus groups, which will give insights to general social norms about marriage, non-marital childbearing, and cohabitation.

Source

court against depopulation

A Russian advertising executive who sued her boss for sexual harassment lost her case after a judge ruled that employers were obliged to make passes at female staff to ensure the survival of the human race.

According to a recent survey (no link), 100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 per cent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven per cent claimed to have been raped.

Eighty per cent of those who participated in the survey said they did not believe it possible to win promotion without engaging in sexual relations with their male superiors.

Women also report that it is common to be browbeaten into sex during job interviews, while female students regularly complain that university professors trade high marks for sexual favours.

Only two women have won sexual harassment cases since the collapse of the Soviet Union, one in 1993 and the other in 1997.

(The judge is female, most likely)

John Graunt book

Natural and Political OBSERVATIONS Mentioned in a following INDEX, and made upon the Bills of Mortality

on an Ed Stephen site

Boston Evening Transcript, August 13, 1913

The School for Health Officers opened its doors on September 29, 1913, offering a one-year program concluding in award of a “Certificate of Public Health.” Potential applicants were expected to have “pursued satisfactory courses” in French and German, as well as physics, chemistry, and biology, with a medical degree strongly recommended. “Experience teaches that preferment for position and advancement to higher positions come more readily to those who have a medical degree,”

the whole text (455 kb, pdf)
remember: send a message to AH

DALY

Raphael 1483–1520, The Death of Ananias

linx from Research Gate Epidemiology and Public Health group answering a question:
I would like to ask how to calculate disability adjusted life years due to a disorder. Can any one suggest good articles on the methodology?

• National Burden of Disease manual of WHO 
• National Medical Journal of India in 2002
• the description of GBD methods that can be applied on a national or sub-national level and tailored to health values of a country, WHO
• Network on Health Expectancy
• psycowiki

And to end the topic:
I am trying to understand how the disability weights are calculated for each particular disease. Please let me know if anybody have resources or information available.