Eideard

The population of the United States grew this year at its slowest rate since the 1940s…as the gloomy economy continued to depress births and immigration fell to its lowest level since 1991…

And just maybe a few other factors like reflecting upon opportunity, choices in general?

The population grew by 2.8 million people from April 2010 to July 2011, according to the bureau’s new estimates. The annual increase, about 0.7 percent when calculated for the year that ended in July 2011, was the smallest since 1945, when the population fell by 0.3 percent in the last year of World War II.

“The nation’s overall growth rate is now at its lowest point since before the baby boom,” the Census Bureau director, Robert M. Groves, said in a statement…Underlying the modest growth was an immigration level that was the lowest in 20 years…slowed substantially when the housing market collapsed, and the jobs associated with its boom that were popular among immigrants disappeared…

A lagging birth rate also contributed. Births in the United States declined precipitously during the recession and its aftermath, down by 7.3 percent from 2007 to 2010, according to Kenneth M. Johnson, the senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. There were slightly over four million births in the year that ended in July, the lowest since 1999.

Economic trauma tends to depress births. In the Great Depression, the birth rate fell by a third, Mr. Johnson said. It is unclear whether the current dip means that births are being delayed or that they are foregone, as they were in the Depression, he said.

In a particularly striking measure of economic distress, birth rates among Hispanics, who are concentrated in states hardest hit by the economic downturn, like Florida and Arizona, declined by 17 percent from 2007 to 2010, Mr. Johnson said. That is compared with a 3.8 percent decline for whites and a 6.7 percent decline for blacks. Rates dropped most sharply among young Hispanics, down by 23 percent for women ages 20 to 24 between 2007 and 2010.

Or – one might hope – sufficient education about everything from equal opportunities in a macho culture to the addition of birth control and abortion to a woman’s choices may have sufficiently affected women in the Hispanic population to bring the birth rate more in line with previous immigrant populations – after a generation or two. Certainly, a greater likelihood than Catholic ideology in the Hispanic community reversing what are normal processes among incomers unto the 2nd and 3rd generations of citizenship.

I doubt if he was any happier when my father waited till the funeral was over and done – and then told the priest to take his church and archaic rules and stick them where the sun don’t shine. And the whole family walked away from that church.

A year after Spain brought in a controversial reform of its abortion laws, statistics show a decline in the number of terminations, putting paid to fears from opponents that rates would rocket. Women are terminating their pregnancies earlier than under the previous legislation, an association for licensed abortion clinics also reported.

Spain brought its abortion laws in line with most other European countries last July allowing abortion on demand up to 14 weeks of pregnancy and up to 22 weeks if there is fetal malformation or threat to the health of the mother.

Before its introduction abortions were offered under restricted circumstances and rarely in a public hospital…The vast majority of the 115,000 abortions carried out in 2009 took place at private clinics, many at a late stage of gestation, and were justified on the grounds that the pregnancy posed a “psychological risk” for the health of the woman.

The legislation saw a series of huge demonstrations by pro-lifers on the streets across Spain supported by the Catholic Church and the conservative opposition Popular Party (PP) who said it would cause a leap in the number of terminations.

But associations for abortion clinics across Spain said the number of terminations had in fact declined to various degrees depending on the region over the year…

Spain’s Health Ministry has yet to publish official figures but confirmed a pattern of decline which it attributed to a number of measures.

“The sale of the ‘morning-after pill’ over the counter, pregnancy prevention programs and the advent of new subsidised contraceptives are all helping reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies,” said Jose Martinez Olmos, Secretary General for Health.

Health workers reported that abortions were being carried out in the earlier stages of pregnancy than before.

The abortion reform was part of an ambitious programme of social change under José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the socialist prime minister, which led to repeated clashes with the Church.

Since winning power in 2004 his government has legalised homosexual marriage, eased divorce laws and dropped religious education from the curriculum in public schools.

Needless to say the Pope and his political pimps in Spain are pissed that all the holy disasters they guaranteed have not come to pass. Perish the thought that ordinary human beings learn they can run their lives pretty darn well without supervision from ancient invisible critters in the sky.

Poland is still an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nation, still conservative and still religious, especially when compared with its European neighbors. But supporters and critics of the Roman Catholic Church all acknowledge that the society is changing. They agree that church representatives in Poland have lost authority and credibility, and that much of the population is moving toward a more secular view of life, one with a greater separation between church and state, and a rejection of church mandates on individual morality.

“We are considered the European museum of Catholicism, but let me tell you we are no longer,” said Szymon Holownia, program director for Religia TV, a relatively new station that aims to convince Poles that faith can and should be relevant in modern life with programs like a cooking show led by a nun. “The relationship between faith and state is changing; it is changing dramatically in Poland,” Mr. Holownia said. “It is really huge.”

“Twenty years of freedom and religion is evaporating,” he said. “This is the crisis of Christianity in Poland.”

Church supporters said the trend was evident in the numbers: 95 percent of Poles identify themselves as Catholic, but only 41 percent attend Sunday Mass regularly. In the big cities of Warsaw and Krakow, only about 20 percent attend Mass regularly on Sundays, according to the Institute of Statistics of the Church. Supporters of the church also said that the numbers dropped far below the 41 percent when it came to accepting moral mandates about issues like divorce and in vitro fertilization, both of which the church opposes and a majority of people appear to support.

“It seems we are Catholics in a cultural way; we identify as Catholic, but do not attend church,” said Tomasz Terlikowski, editor of Fronda, a conservative Catholic magazine, who said he was upset with what he called the lack of effective church leadership against the secular tide…

Antichurch sentiment has run so hot that one of the most popular politicians in the country, Janusz Palikot, started a political party based largely on an anticlerical platform…

RTFA. Lots of rationales and excuses offered by clergy who obviously are panicked over their loss of stature within Polish politics, fear of a massive reduction in social and political power in daily life.

That’s what happens when your ideology is irrelevant. That is, in nations where education and learning aren’t limited [or self-limited] to exclusively parochial concerns. True throughout Europe. Becoming true through Asia and Latin America.

The number of young people dropping out of high school has been slashed in half in the last 20 years, according to new data from Statistics Canada.

In 1990-91, nearly 340,000 or 16.6 per cent of young people aged 20 to 24 had not completed a high school diploma and were not attending school.

But in the last two decades, that number has dropped dramatically, falling to 8.5 per cent of young people or 191,000 by the 2009-10 school year.

More young women continue to stay in school, with a dropout rate of 6.6 per cent, better than the 10.3 per cent of young men, however that gap has narrowed over the previous 20 years. In 1990-91, the rate was 14 per cent for women and 19.2 per cent for men…

The data also looked at the effect of the economic downturn in 2008-09, when nearly one out of every four dropouts in the labour market was unable to find a job. Among those who did find work, their earnings were less than for those with a high school diploma.

British Columbia, at 6.2 per cent, has the fewest number of young people without a high school diploma.

Golly gee, folks. How do those dropout rates from the GWN look compared to your own community, your state?

Think we should take a look at the hows and whys of what goes on in Canadian education – or leave it all in the hands of Congress and our state legislatures?

Would you buy a used car from either of these clowns?

Denmark, Singapore and New Zealand formed a three-way tie as the least corrupt countries in the 2010 Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, while Somalia was rated the most corrupt and the U.S score declined.

Those three countries were the leaders last year as well, though in 2009 New Zealand was first, with Denmark and Singapore closely behind. The index, developed for at least the last 15 years by the Berlin-based international anti-corruption group, is widely used by business, civil society groups and others when determining corruption risk across the globe.

This year, the index found that three-quarters of the 178 countries scored below 5 on a Zero-to-10 scale, indicating serious corruption problems. A country’s perceived corruption decreases as its score increases. Denmark, Singapore and New Zealand each scored a 9.3, whereas Somalia scored a 1.1 and the U.S. saw its score drop to 7.1 in 2010 from 7.5 a year ago…

“We need to see more enforcement of existing rules and laws. There should be nowhere to hide for the corrupt or their money,” said Huguette Labelle, chair of Transparency International, in the statement.

Of the hundreds of sources covering the release of this report, I chose the Wall Street Journal – just to peep the conservative moneyboys perception of corruption. The result was predictable – scant mention that the United States continues in decline. BTW, the USA was 14th before George W’s election. Now, we’re 22nd.

Wow. What a wonderful world of choice. Here in New Mexico we have one reasonably courageous senator and one matching congressman [not in my district - so, I don't get to vote for him]. The rest are the same old, lame old story – running against a stereotypical slate of Republicans whose only claim to fame is that they’re presently unemployed in government.

My kind of Mercury

This was bound to happen sooner or later. Over the last ten years, Mercury’s sales numbers have plummeted, and currently, the brand only accounts for 0.8 percent of Ford Motor Company’s overall market share. In a press conference this afternoon…the automaker has officially announced that Mercury will be discontinued in the fourth quarter of this year.

With all of the forward momentum that Ford has been experiencing over the past few years, no brand-specific models were introduced to the Mercury lineup. What’s more, the vast majority of recent Mercury purchases were made through discounts offered to retirees, friends and family. Mercury’s dealer network (coupled with the Lincoln brand) is currently in the process of being notified about Ford’s decision, and owners are reassured that existing Mercury products can still be serviced at any Ford or (newly standalone) Lincoln dealer.

But it isn’t all bad news down in Dearborn – Ford is using Mercury’s demise as a better reason to seriously beef up the Lincoln brand. Including the 2011 MKZ Hybrid and refreshed 2011 MKX, Ford is expanding the Lincoln lineup with the addition of seven all-new or wholly refreshed vehicles, including the brand’s first-ever C-segment vehicle, possibly related to the C Concept that we saw at the 2009 Detroit Auto Show.

Furthermore, Lincoln will be offering EcoBoost powertrains across the entire lineup, including the next-generation Navigator full-size SUV. Ford is committed to making Lincoln substantially more prosperous in America, saying that the brand will house more useful features and technology than any other competitor, as well as offering the most fuel-efficient lineup of luxury vehicles.

Alan Mulally is the closest thing to Steve Jobs currently in the U.S. automobile industry. What I mean by that is the ability to see far enough ahead of consumers’ needs and requirements to get the next best thing ready in time for that market.

Disclaimer: I own enough Ford shares to buy a fraction of a Fiesta. But, I admit I bought ‘em cheap.

Psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis have found an intriguing possibility that personality and brain aging during the golden years may be linked.

Studying MRI images of 79 volunteers between the ages of 44 and 88 — who also had provided personality and demographic data — the researchers found lower volumes of gray matter in the frontal and medial temporal brain regions of volunteers who ranked high in neuroticism traits, compared with higher volumes of gray matter in those who ranked high in conscientious traits…

She notes also that the results could be seen as “the tail wagging the dog.” That is, it is actually brain changes during aging that influence personality.

“Right now, we can’t disentangle those two, but we plan to in the future by conducting ongoing studies of the volunteers over time to note future structural changes,” Head says…

“We assumed that neuroticism would be negatively related to structural volume,” Jackson says. “We really focused on the prefrontal and medial temporal regions because they are the regions where you see the greatest age changes, and they are also seats of attention, emotion and memory. We found that more neurotic individuals had smaller volumes in certain prefrontal and medial temporal parts of the brain than those who were less neurotic, and the opposite pattern was found with conscientiousness…”

Another way of looking at the findings, Head says, is that neuroticism might add an increasing vulnerability to the pathological processes that go on in aging, particularly in Alzheimer’s.

So, if I plucked some bible-quoting, creationist birther from the middle of a Tea Party rendezvous – grabbed him by the neck and gave him a shake – I’d probably hear his brain rattling around inside his kettle, eh?

Microsoft’s Bing has seen slow but steady month over month growth since it launched this past summer. However, September saw Bing’s share of the U.S. search market fall to 8.5 percent.

New numbers from StatCounter show that rather than continuing its trend of acquiring more market share at the expense of competitors Google and Yahoo!, Bing fell by 1.1 percent (bringing the decision making engine down from 9.64 percent to 8.51 percent) while Google rose two full percentage points, moving to 80.08 percent, up from the 77.83 percent it had in August. Yahoo! also declined, moving to 9.40 percent from 10.50 percent.

This is rough news in itself, however the fact that its Bing’s first decline since it launched in May.

“The trend has been downwards for Bing since mid August,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “The wheels haven’t fallen off but the underlying trend must be a little worrying for Microsoft.”

You can find more details than Microsoft wants to see over at statcounter.

Special shapes Greenland potato award for climate “skeptics”

New research, which reconstructs the extent of ice in the sea between Greenland and Svalbard from the 13th century to the present indicates that there has never been so little sea ice as there is now. The research results from the Niels Bohr Institute, among others, are published in the scientific journal, Climate Dynamics.

There are of course neither satellite images nor instrumental records of the climate all the way back to the 13th century, but nature has its own ‘archive’ of the climate in both ice cores and the annual growth rings of trees and we humans have made records of a great many things over the years – such as observations in the log books of ships and in harbour records. Piece all of the information together and you get a picture of how much sea ice there has been throughout time…

In order to determine how much sea ice there has been, the researchers needed to turn to data from the logbooks of ships, which whalers and fisherman kept of their expeditions to the boundary of the sea ice. The ship logbooks are very precise and go all the way back to the 16th century. They relate at which geographical position the ice was found. Another source of information about the ice are records from harbours in Iceland, where the severity of the winters have been recorded since the end of the 18th century.

By combining the curve of the climate with the actual historical records of the distribution of the ice, researchers have been able to reconstruct the extent of the sea ice all the way back to the 13th century. Even though the 13th century was a warm period, the calculations show that there has never been so little sea ice as in the 20th century…

None of this is a surprise to anyone who follows climate science in peer-reviewed journals. OTOH, there is the crowd who gets their rocks off when a daily weather chart shows what they hope to be a contradictory anomaly.

Too bad our professional weather “skeptics” have no perception of the differences between weather and climate.

Another bubble has burst. Instead of dot-com stocks or debt securities, this one involves a very different kind of paper, the free newspaper.

Starting in Stockholm in 1995 with a daily called Metro, free newspapers spread to cities around the world, providing the embattled print media business a rare growth story. By last year, daily circulation of free papers had climbed above 40 million worldwide, according to Piet Bakker, a professor in Amsterdam who tracks the business. In some countries, like Spain, more people were reading freebies than papers they had to pay for.

Since the economic crisis deepened last autumn, however, the free newspaper business has gone into free fall. Circulation in Europe, which accounts for more than two-thirds of the global total, has fallen by more than 10 percent, Mr. Bakker said, and dozens of titles have closed…

While paid-for newspapers are suffering, too, free newspapers have been hit even harder by the economic downturn because they rely entirely on advertising, which is more volatile than revenue from newsstand sales and subscriptions. Analysts say ad revenue at many free newspapers has fallen by more than a third in recent months, compared with a year earlier…

One thing that divides freesheet publishers is their approach to the Internet. Metro International, for instance, has invested little on the Web.

“Will you ever be able to make money on general-interest news on the Internet?” Mr. Kronborg said. “We think it will be very difficult.”

But Schibsted, an Oslo-based publisher of freesheets like 20 Minutes in France (in partnership with a local newspaper company, Ouest France) and 20 Minutos in Spain, sees things differently, saying there is a natural synergy between free papers in print and the predominant free model for news on the Web.

While these two papers’ Web operations lose money, the print editions of 20 Minutes and 20 Minutos were profitable until the economic crisis deepened this year, said Sverre Munck, head of international operations at Schibsted.

The business model may be promising – and I agree that it is – but, investors are so cranky and conservative they inevitably consider one round of failures to be struck in stone.