1. Shanghai - down 65.2%
2. Mumbai - down 51.9%
3. Singapore - down 49.2%
4. Hong Kong - down 48.3%
5. Paris - down 42.7%
6. Tokyo - down 42.1%
7. Sydney - down 41.3%
8. Frankfurt - down 40.4%
9. New York - down 34%
10. London - down 31.3%

London has the worst year in its history (but the index in question is only 20 years old), although comes out bottom of the list in terms of severity.

The chart is interesting in that the two places which could be worst affected in the longer term are New York and London, and the markets that are most likely to bounce back are Shanghai and Mumbai. This is partly a function of size and resulting inertia.

Link

Tim Lambert shreds Global Warming denialists such as Matt Drudge.

The recent appropriation of the term ‘denialist’ which is traditionally paired with ‘holocaust’ is a minor PR victory for scientists who are not normally good at this. I like it.

Jesus, if he existed, was almost certainly not born tomorrow - but Isaac Newton was.
Happy Newton Day.

“It was the year that the Large Hadron Collider was finally fired up — and then abruptly shut down — and 2008 also saw significant progress towards the detection of dark matter. Physicists got a little closer to making practical quantum computers and 2008 saw a few nifty inventions to harvest energy from human motion. US president elect Barack Obama made a few high-profile science nominations that could signal a change in the US government’s view of climate change. It was also a good year for Japanese physics, as three Japanese-born particle physicists won the Nobel Prize in Physics.”

Link

The headline sound like an exaggeration, but this is exactly what Paul Krugman has alleged today:

“$400 billion a year in waste, fraud and abuse.
But the costs of America’s Ponzi era surely went beyond the direct waste of dollars and cents.
At the crudest level, Wall Street’s ill-gotten gains corrupted and continue to corrupt politics”

Amazing.

Alexandra Penney, a 60 something, urbane, Manhattanite, former magazine editor, lost her life savings in the Madoff scheme. Her story is told here.

This is a tragedy, Penney has fallen a long way from a dizzying New York height and has contemplated suicide. She didn’t inherit her money, she fought hard for it as a single mother. She wrote a best selling book called How to Make Love to a Man, and now she has been royally screwed by one, Bernie Madoff.

She now faces not ruin, but having to move out of her Upper East Side apartment, selling her second home in West Palm Beach, getting rid of her Soho studio, using her reserve savings account, taking the subway for the first time in 30 years and ironing her 40 white shirts.

Its through the banal detail of ironing that within this story, an untold one surfaces, about Alexandra’s maid, Yolanda.

“She needs money. She sends it to her family in Colombia. I have more than affection for Yolanda, I love her as part of my family.”

Yolanda is presumably one of those invisible people that served at the party when times were good, but we don’t know much about her, because people like Yolanda don’t often feature in magazine profiles.

We hear from Alexandra that she will be let go. Sold off with the “high thread count sheets, old china, watches, jewelry, Hermes purses, and Louboutin shoes”, when the proceeds from these could perhaps have secured both Yolanda and her family’s future.

In doing so, this could have been a real triumph over adversity, it could have been Alexandar Penney’s finest hour, her redemption. But instead, like Madoff’s billions, she blew it.

I genuinely feel sorry for Alexandra, happiness and perceived calamity are relative. I would be devastated by a fall to the level that millions around the world struggle to live on, so it would be hypocritical to judge too harshly. But there is a difference between hard times and not enough to eat, and that is what people like Yolanda face. You cannot let them eat cake.

Poor Alexandra, poorer Yolanda.

Terre Natale is an exhibition at Jean Nouvel’s Cartier Foundation about people displaced by conflict and natural disasters, based on the work of Paul Virilio.

I am not a fan of Virilio (I am not a fan of anyone whose bio includes both of the words French and philosopher, to be honest) but this exhibition is both excellent and groundbreaking.

It includes a stupendous cylindrical projection of animated quantitative data representing the flow of displaced people, wordwide, in an environment designed by Diller Scoffidio + Renfro.

Michael Zick Doherty worked on the stunning graphics which were produced using the open source data visualization application, Processing.

The only problem with the animations, is that they are so beautiful and seductive that you have to consciously remember that what is being explained is a global tragedy. This is perhaps the sad but unavoidable result of the quasi-autistic nature of quantitative over qualitative.

A must read piece by Steven Novella on the dangerous, widespread acceptance of fraudulent and quack medicine, such as homeopathy (water) to the extent that this statement may seem controversial:

“Fifty years ago what passes today as CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine) was snake oil, fraud, folk medicine, and quackery. The promoters of dubious health claims were charlatans, quacks, and con artists. Somehow they managed to pull off the greatest con of all - a culture change in which fraud became a legitimate alternative to scientific medicine, the line between science and pseudoscience was deliberate blurred, regulations designed to protect the public from quackery were weakened or eliminated, and it became politically incorrect to defend scientific standards in medicine.”

After the collapse of the banking industry, deregulation is becoming a dirty word. Perhaps its time to fight back against the deregulation that allowed for alternative medicine? After all, this was a battle originally lost because of emotion rather than reason.

As Steven Novella puts it:

“Why hasn’t Ralph Nader noticed this? What if the auto industry promoted “automobile freedom” laws so that consumers could buy any vehicles they wanted, free from any government quality or safety regulation?”

Link

Buried in this article about fad treatments for autism is the fact that the number of people diagnosed with autism has increased 20 times since the 70s.

Either we are better at diagnosing autism; there is an autism epidemic or we are falsely diagnosing children with autism.

Although extreme cases of autism prove that this is a serious a debilitating condition, I can’t help feeling its the latter and that both autism diagnosis and treatment are fads. The central role that autism has played in wrongful public hysteria over vaccination risks is perhaps due, in part, to the fact that autism diagnosis is a less than perfect science.

Link

Advertising that taps the subconscious performs better. Link