El blog de Manuel Álvarez López: 15.11.11

Entrevista a Arcadi Espada. Alfonso Armada

-¿En qué medida ha quedado herida Ibercrea por el escándalo de la SGAE, uno de sus principales patrocinadores?

-En ninguna medida. En primer lugar porque el primer “escándalo SGAE” es el tratamiento mediático dado a una investigación judicial que acaba de comenzar. Es digno de estudio el proceso que va desde el “relato fáctico indiciario” del juez a todo lo que se ha escrito y dicho de Teddy Bautista.

-¿Sigue pensando que ha habido un linchamiento mediático de Teddy Bautista?

-Por supuesto. El acoso mediático a la SGAE, que viene de lejos, y cuyos recovecos son interesantísimos, se estudiará en el futuro como un caso de manual. Un ejemplo muy actual de ese acoso tiene que ver con el arquitecto Fajardo. Se publicó ampliamente su querella contra Teddy Bautista. Pero aún es la hora de que se diga nada sobre el archivo decretado por el juez.

[...]

-¿Qué reacción le provoca el binomio industria cultural?

-Le tengo un gran aprecio. Gracias al derecho de autor la cultura entró a formar parte del mercado y de la industria, se democratizó y se convirtió en una mercancía fundamental del intercambio humano. Volver a un modelo renacentista, basado en la esclavitud del mecenazgo, sería una propuesta distópica, reaccionaria. No ha existido un gran pacto de Estado que proteja adecuadamente los derechos de propiedad intelectual, y los operadores consideran que en nuestro mercado hay escasa seguridad jurídica, lo que es un peligro para sus inversiones. Si esto no se corrige, y pronto, España corre el riesgo de perder el liderazgo como industria cultural, lo que resulta dramático en un momento en el que la tendencia de nuestras economías es, precisamente, considerar al conocimiento como el elemento de mayor valor productivo.

Leer entrevista completa.

El Retiro y la Puerta de Alcalá, Madrid. María Jesús Martín Villar

Autora de las fotografías: María Jesús Martín Villar.

Arms and the Corrupt Man. Andrew Feinstein

Last week’s conviction of Viktor Bout, the so-called Merchant of Death, was a rare moment of triumph in the fight against the illicit arms trade.

But it points to the fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of the global trade in weapons: Governments protect corrupt and dangerous arms dealers as long as they need them and then throw them behind bars when they are no longer useful.

Arms deals stretch across a continuum of legality and ethics from the formal trade to the gray and black markets. In practice, the boundaries between the three markets are fuzzy.

With bribery and corruption de rigueur — a Transparency International study estimated that the arms trade accounted for almost 40 percent of corruption in all global trade — there are very few arms transactions that do not involve illegality, most often through middlemen, agents or dealers like Mr. Bout.

Mr. Bout made fortunes providing “transport and logistical” services — an oft-used euphemism favored by arms dealers — to conflict zones around the world on behalf of governments, the United Nations, large listed companies and myriad covert operators.

His clients included, among others, the Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, the Northern Alliance and then the Taliban in Afghanistan, a number of the protagonists in the Balkans, the Angolan government and its mortal enemy the Unita rebel movement, and all sides in the complex conflict that continues to rage in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Read full in Revista de Prensa.

Why Do People Eat Too Much? Jonah Lehrer

“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.”
- M.F.K. Fisher

Human beings are notoriously terrible at knowing when we’re no longer hungry. Instead of listening to our stomach – a very stretchy container – we rely on all sorts of external cues, from the circumference of the dinner plate to the dining habits of those around us. If the serving size is twice as large (and American serving sizes have grown 40 percent in the last 25 years), we’ll still polish it off. And then we’ll go have dessert.

Consider a clever study done by Brian Wansink, a professor of marketing at Cornell. He used a bottomless bowl of soup – there was a secret tube that kept on refilling the bowl with soup from below – to demonstrate that how much people eat is largely dependent on how much you give them. The group with the bottomless bowl ended up consuming nearly 70 percent more than the group with normal bowls. What’s worse, nobody even noticed that they’d just slurped far more soup than normal.

Or look at this study, done in 2006 by psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania. One day, they left out a bowl of chocolate M&M’s in an upscale apartment building. Next to the bowl was a small scoop. The following day, they refilled the bowl with M&M’s but placed a much larger scoop beside it. The result would not surprise anyone who has ever finished a Big Gulp soda or a supersized serving of McDonald’s fries: when the scoop size was increased, people took 66 percent more M&M’s. Of course, they could have taken just as many candies on the first day; they simply would have had to take a few more scoops. But just as larger serving sizes cause us to eat more, the larger scoop made the residents more gluttonous.

Continue reading in The Wired.

El drama centroamericano. Andrés Oppenheimer

Aunque Washington no lo reconozca, el hecho de que los carteles de la droga se estén desplazando de México a Centroamérica es evidencia de que —al margen de algunos logros— algo no funciona en la estrategia antidrogas de Estados Unidos.

Primero, tras el Plan Colombia, los carteles se trasladaron de Colombia a México. Ahora, después del Plan Mérida, se están trasladando de México a Centroamérica. El próximo paso, si Estados Unidos apoya un plan similar para Centroamérica, se trasladarán al Caribe, o a algún otro sitio.
Es hora de considerar la posibilidad de legalizar la marihuana y usar lo recaudado para educación y prevención de la droga en Estados Unidos, Europa, Brasil y otras naciones consumidoras, así como para ayudar a que los países productores y de tránsito puedan combatir más eficientemente a los carteles más violentos.

De otra manera, seguiremos gastando miles de millones de dólares y nos embarcaremos en nuevas guerras contra las drogas tan sólo para lograr que los carteles del narcotráfico se sigan mudando de un lugar a otro.

Leer artículo compreto en ENH.

South Korea’s economy. What do you do when you reach the top?

To outsiders, South Korea’s heroic economic ascent is a template for success. But now it has almost caught up with the developed world it must change its approach.

IT IS a crisp autumn morning in Seoul, and a hopeful fisherman sits dreaming by the Cheonggyecheon stream as the world bustles happily by. Glass skyscrapers rise behind him housing the capital’s new financial district. The shopfronts at their base are among the swankiest in Asia. Office workers, families and schoolchildren amble past. Busking fills the air. The water tumbles past plum trees and willows.

Twenty years ago, this background would itself have seemed a dream for anyone foolish enough to be trying to fish the Cheonggyecheon. Its waters, dirty and hidden, were trapped beneath a roaring highway; its surroundings were a slum of sweatshops, metal bashing and poverty. The reclamation of the Cheonggyecheon, one of the great urban-regeneration projects of the world, has about it the air of a dream achieved. So, to a large extent, has the Korea through which the stream flows.

In 1960, in the aftermath of a devastating war, the exhausted south was one of the poorest countries in the world, with an income per head on a par with the poorest parts of Africa. By the end of 2011 it will be richer than the European Union average, with a gross domestic product per person of $31,750, calculated on a basis of purchasing-power parity (PPP), compared with $31,550 for the EU. South Korea is the only country that has so far managed to go from being the recipient of a lot of development aid to being rich within a working life.

Continue reading in The Economist.

Scientific heresy. Matt Ridley

It is a great honour to be asked to deliver the Angus Millar lecture.

I have no idea whether Angus Millar ever saw himself as a heretic, but I have a soft spot for heresy. One of my ancestral relations, Nicholas Ridley* the Oxford martyr, was burned at the stake for heresy.

My topic today is scientific heresy. When are scientific heretics right and when are they mad? How do you tell the difference between science and pseudoscience?

Let us run through some issues, starting with the easy ones.

Astronomy is a science; astrology is a pseudoscience.
Evolution is science; creationism is pseudoscience.
Molecular biology is science; homeopathy is pseudoscience.
Vaccination is science; the MMR scare is pseudoscience.
Oxygen is science; phlogiston was pseudoscience.
Chemistry is science; alchemy was pseudoscience.
Are you with me so far?

A few more examples. That the earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare is pseudoscience. So are the beliefs that Elvis is still alive, Diana was killed by MI5, JFK was killed by the CIA, 911 was an inside job. So are ghosts, UFOs, telepathy, the Loch Ness monster and pretty well everything to do with the paranormal. Sorry to say that on Halloween, but that’s my opinion.

Continue reading in Watts Up With That?

Mapa Lingüístico de la Península en Tiempo Real. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde

Cosas interesantes que veo (de verdad que sin ningún tipo de comentario editorial, es lo que me llama la atención):

1) La gran concentración metropolitana de Madrid.
2) Como se pueden seguir las carreteras radiales sin ningún problema.
3) La población, en las costas. Aragón y Castilla, mucho más vacias.
4) En Cataluña, el área de Barcelona está muy mezclada, fuera el catalán predomina mucho más.
5) En la Comunidad Valenciana predomina el castellano, excepto en el norte de Castellón.
6) Poco peso del gallego (aunque con el esquema de colores y sin los datos exactos es difícil de precisar).
7) El este de Portugal está vacío.

Leer entrada completa en Nada es Gratis.

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