Old LaMarotte and New

Beginning today, I will continue this blog on another platform. To reach the new LaMarotte, click here.

This version of the blog, extending from April 6, 2009 to March 17, 2011, will continue to be up and functional, but all new content will appear elsewhere.

Why this change? The reason is that LaMarotte here has evidently begun to generate sufficient traffic so that it has become attractive to advertisers. The general arrangement under which one operates here gives WordPress the right to run ads when they so choose. Readers of mine have discovered that ads are showing here. They were not visible to me because–well, they are suppressed if you are logged into your own site!

My problem is that advertising clashes with LaMarotte‘s thematics. Mine is a sometimes wry commentary on matters economic and secular. The casual reader might think me hypocritical: castigating companies, here and there–also praising others, here and there–and benefitting from advertising income. I don’t. I provide the content. Others get what benefits might be available. Hence this change.

As a final comment I would add here that WordPress is a splendid platform and I’ve enjoyed producing LaMarotte here. Nor did even the hint of a cloud of disagreement appear in my dealings with the hard-working WordPress technical staffs.

See you on the Blogger version…

Population by Size of Place

The Bureau of the Census keeps track of incorporated places by size. Incorporated places may be cities, towns, or villages. Some entities, although called a village, may not be incorporated. Thus knowing whether or not the following chart includes you will depend on whether that word, incorporated, applies to your place or not. The census provides eight divisions, from 1 million in population or greater down to under 10,000. Herewith a graphic showing the number of incorporated places and the total population that goes with each size category. The source is Table 28 at on this web page.

There are nine places with more than a million in population—and 16,580 in the under 10,000 category. The three largest sizes are too small to show up on  the graph, but the number is shown at the bottom. The population associated with each size-group is shown in red (right axis) and the number, in millions, indicated above. In 2009 the U.S. population was 309 million. This chart shows 192.2 million indicating that 62 percent of the population lived in incorporated places in 2009.

Interesting to note that the population is roughly equally divided by size categories. The largest proportion live in cities between 100 and 250 thousand. The average population of the smallest places is 1,731 souls.

Statistical Marginalization

Not many non-scholars these days have read all or part of the great Theodor Mommsen’s History of Rome, but I am sure that those who have were greatly challenged by reading about so many, many different peoples with unrecognizable names and their often changing and generally puzzling geographical locations. And all these very energetic groups just in what we call Italy today? But you don’t have to go all the way back to the origins of Rome to be confused. Even an historical map of pre-Augustan Italy produces regions that barely ring a bell (Acalabria, Apulia, Samnium, Picenum, Umbria—just up the Adriatic coast), and we’re not talking about peoples with languages of their own.

New Madrid Seismic Zone

People in  the West, and particularly in California, are only too aware of earthquakes. But when very big ones fill the news, some of us in the Midwest have the recollection that we might be living over a great seismic fault of our own. That recollection is correct. The zone in question is called the New Madrid fault or seismic zone. Its name comes from the town of New Madrid, Missouri, south-east of St. Louis and almost touching Tennessee. A series of the greatest earthquakes ever took place centered around New Madrid in the years 1811 and 1812. According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) these quakes damaged 600,000 square kilometers and had been perceived in a circle of 5 million square kilometers! As the USGS states here:

They were by far the largest east of the Rocky Mountains in the U.S. and Canada. The area of strong shaking associated with these shocks is two to three times as large as that of the 1964 Alaska earthquake and 10 times as large as that of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

The quake predated seismological measurements in the United States, hence their magnitudes are unknown. The isoseismal map of that quake, thus the intensity of it as it moved outward from its origin, is shown on the next graphic available here from the USGS. As the map shows, quite a few very large cities are in the shadow of New Madrid if that great monster should awaken, and the intensity weakens as far away from the center as Boston in Massachusetts and New Orleans in Louisiana.

Next is a photograph taken in 1912, thus a hundred years after the quake, in Lake County, Tennessee, showing stumps of trees killed by deposits of sand. The first photos taken of the damage all date from 1904 or later.

Finally, below, a USGS map of earthquake hazard regions in the United States. New Madrid is the bull’s eye there, in the center of the country.

Local Stats

What’s your income? And what about your neighbors’? What do houses sell for around here? Are we growing or losing people? Am I the only Asian living here?

If this sort of data interest you, you should go here. It is the site of the U.S. Census Bureau. There you will find, at present in the right hand column, something called Quick Facts. The resource allows you to set your state. After you do so, a long statistical table, for the state, will appear. But at the top of that table you’ll be able to pick either your county or your city. The cities will be of the larger sort. I happen to live in an inner suburb of Detroit too small to get a table, but it’s possible to look at the nearest largest area, in my case that’s Eastpointe, MI. The place has 33,000 people—and is losing population. Whites are 92 percent, Blacks 5 percent, Asians 0.9, and American Indians 0.4 percent of the population.

Home ownership? 88 percent. The median value of a home? It’s $98,100—over against the average for the state as a whole of $115,600. The median household income is $46,262, and per capita income is $20,665. Household income is higher than in Michigan as a whole, per capita is lower. Some 6.4 percent of all persons live beneath the poverty line.

Intriguing? Inclined to compare this area with another? Fine. Let’s take the much more upscale Rochester Hills, MI. It has 69,800 people, is gaining in population. Whites are 88.8, Blacks 2.4, Asians 6.8, and American Indians 0.2 percent of the population.

Home ownership is 79.1 percent. The median house value is $226,200, nearly twice the Michigan average. Median household income is $74,912, per capita income is $35,070—yet 3.4 percent still live below the poverty line.

Interesting. Have fun. You’ll have fifty data points to examine and always in comparison to the larger entity, the USA in contrast to the state, the State in contrast to the county or the city. 

Earthquake in Japan

The image you see above shows earthquake activity in Asia as of 12:54 Greenwich Mean Time, these days called UTC, coordinated universal time—thus at 7:54 Eastern Standard Time in the United States.  So many earthquakes have taken place in or near Japan that the symbols marking them almost obliterate central Japan on this map. The map is courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and available here. Clicking through that link will show the most current map.

As I’ve noted a year ago January, we live on a violent earth. That post is accessible here. The image shown today for Asia records 288 earthquakes over the last week. The world map, of which this is just a piece (available here) shows 449 quakes for the same period.

I keep track of the sun and of earthquakes on LaMarotte by way of maintaining my humility while enlarging my perspective. We’re tiny and the world is great and unfathomable.

Referrer Spam: Update

If the phrase does not mean anything to you, this post will be of no interest. I described the problem on this post a while back. Yesterday I received a notification from Mark at WordPress (it may also have gone to others) which I thought I’d reproduce here. It is very informative and tells us that WordPress is actively countering the spamming. Here is the essence of Mark’s message (slightly edited):

While we cannot stop referrer spam at the points where it originates (thus outside of wordpress.com) we do take this problem seriously and block reported domains from stats. Of course the spammers know that we block them and, to continue, they just get another domain.

This is a very hard problem to deal with. Based on my experience dealing with spam over the last five years, here is what I think is happening:

1. A spammer finds a lax domain registrar or makes a deal with a less than scrupulous one.
2. Spammer buys a large number of sites.
3. The spammer then fills those spam sites with ads or possibly malware or hate content (the hate content is a new tactic).
4. Spammer then spams thousands of websites. — Thus far he will have bought the domains using a program (electronically, automatically) and put all the ads on using the same technique. His cost is therefore minimal.
5. Spammer hopes people will follow those links back to his site, thus that they will click on them. — Because his costs thus far are small, it only takes a few purchases  (from those whose ads are also clicked in that process) to make money. If the site is serving malware, the spammer is paid for each site infected.
6. Spammer then returns the domains back to the registrar within the accepted time-limit and gets a full refund. Thus he doesn’t even pay for the domain!  — If you buy a domain through wordpress.com, for example, you can cancel within two days. A dodgy registrar might provide a longer period, but it will still be a short amount of time. That’s why spammers appear and then rapidly disappear again. So it’s all profit.

Can we stop it? I’m afraid we can’t simply because it is outside of our control. No blog within wordpress.com is engaged in such spamming. But while we cannot stop it, we do block every domain that gets reported—and, again, thanks for reporting the scams. Doing so helps everyone, not just you!

You can detect spam by looking in the Referrer box on your Site Stats page. The spammer will be a referrer you don’t recognize producing an unusually large number of hits. These are phony hits. Nobody is actually visiting your site; it’s automated. If you detect such spam, Mark advises doing as follows:

1. Copy the spammer’s url (highlight and then Ctrl-C).

2. Go to the WordPress Support site here.

3. Fill in the blanks of the questionnaire. Blog URL will let you pick your own blog. Subject should be “Referrer Spam”. Topic: Select “Traffic”.

4. In the message block, underneath the preprinted I did: I saw: and I expected: lines, simply insert the spammer’s url (Ctrl-V).

That’s it. Mark requests that you enter nothing else. It speeds up their processes, and they recognize what you are doing if you follow the rules above.

That’s it. Please cooperate. Many visitors to my site have done just that, and the more of us do it, the more rapidly this attack will be foiled. All for one and one for all!

Social Insurance: Principles

In recent posts I’ve compared social security as managed in this country and in Germany.  It surprised me that the website of the German Social Insurance Associations here (in English) gives a lot of emphasis to the principles underlying social insurance. The basic principle the web site cites is human rights, this by means of a quotation from Article 22 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948. Here it is:

Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realisation, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organisation and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

The site then, under Basic Principles, lists six.

1. The principle of compulsory insurance
2. The principle of financing through contributions
3. The principle of solidarity
4. The principle of self-government
5. The principle of free movement
6. The principle of equivalence

Calculating Growth Rate

These days it’s easy to download statistical tables in Excel from governmental and other sources. Sometimes quite long series are presented, and it is useful, in doing a little analysis, to calculate annual growth rates for two series in order to compare them, let us  say the growth in the sales of Company B and Company C.

Excel provides an excellent function to let us do that easily. Let me demonstrate that function using tabular data as these might appear in a spreadsheet. AGR in the table represents Annual Growth Rate:
           

	A	B	C
1	2000	100	3,545
2	2001	101	3,670
3	2002	102	3,809
4	2003	103	3,765
5	2004	104	4,013
6	2005	105	4,013
7	2006	106	4,029
8	2007	107	4,567
9	2008	108	4,580
10	2009	109	4,576
11	2010	110	4,836
12	AGR in %	0.96	3.15

German Pension Insurance

The German equivalent of our Social Security System (it also includes pensions as well as retired health insurance) is called German Pension Insurance (Deutsche Rentenversicherung, here DRV; it is an entity, a public corporation). This system is based on the principle that those currently working, together with their employers, will pay the pensions of those who are retired. The DRV is therefore not an annuity system but described as a cross-generational exchange. You work now and pay for your parents/grandparents. When you are old enough, your children/grand-children pay for you. The system is based on annual income and expenditures. It is organized under law in such a manner that any shortfalls that occur between income and expenditures are covered by the German Federal Government.