For the first time since the Spanish influenza of 1918, life expectancy is falling for a significant number of American women. In nearly 1,000 counties that together are home to about 12 percent of the nation’s women, life expectancy is now shorter than it was in the early 1980s, according to a study published today.

The trend appears to be driven by increases in death from diabetes, lung cancer, emphysema and kidney failure. It reflects the long-term consequences of smoking, a habit that women took up in large numbers decades after men did, and the slowing of the historic decline in heart disease deaths.

Washington Post staff writer David Brown and Majid Ezzati, co-author of the study and researcher at the Harvard Global Health Initiative, were online Tuesday, April 22, at 11 a.m. ET to discuss the study.

A transcript follows.

Continue reading the transcript on the Washington Post

The sad thing is that most of these causes stem from preventable things. I remember a medical school lecture that I heard last year that said that in order to combat our nation’s growing obesity problem we as the medical community should treat obesity as a disease. For the current picture of the trend to obesity in the United States, I direct you to the CDC data from 1985-2006. And this site took that CDC data and made it into an animated GIF showing obesity rates over time. According to the CDC data, “In 2006, only four states had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%. Twenty-two states had a prevalence equal or greater than 25%; two of these states (Mississippi and West Virginia) had a prevalence of obesity equal to or greater than 30%.”

If one of the national health objectives for the year 2010 is to reduce the prevalence of obesity among adults to less than 15%, we have a long way to go.

Google Maps for a few years now has offered the ability to search for a route taking public transportation. This service, called Google Transit, is now offered in dozens of US and world cities, including the city that I have been living in for the past two years. Having recently experienced the excellent public transportation system in Prague, I hope that this service will make the Milwaukee system more popular for everyone. When I lived in Madison, WI for undergrad, I used the public transportation system all the time. It was free or very cheap for students. I’ve yet to use the Milwaukee public transportation system because I have my own car and because it would have been scary to ride the buses without having a specific idea of where they are going or the approximate time frame. This is probably the biggest hurdle for a system of only buses (like in Milwaukee)…in Prague everyone rides the public transit system (trams, buses, and subway). It was also very cheap in Prague. If buying a set of day passes for an entire week, the cost was about $6-7 a day for unlimited travel on any of the public transit options. In Milwaukee, the cost for an adult is $2 per ride and residents only get the choice of bus. And, I’m sure that the quality of our bus system cannot compare to the service that I had in Prague. But, services like Google Transit are a start. I hope they help inspire improvements in public transportation across the US.

One more thing. Sign this petition to ask Google to add a “Bike There” option to Google Maps.
Here are some sites with more info about this:
“Bike There” petition for Google Maps gets support
I Want Google to Keep Me Out of A Pickle
Big News (regarding Austin and Google)

Options traders who predicted Google Inc. would beat estimates earned as much as 17,530 percent on their investments today, the most-profitable bet among all U.S. equity derivatives.

Contracts giving the right to buy Google shares for $530 before the close of trading today jumped as high as $17.63 from their 10-cent closing price yesterday. That gain almost matched the 18,760 percent advance in the Dow Jones Industrial Average since the beginning of 1900, according to Bloomberg data.

Source: Bloomberg (Google Earnings Gave Options Traders a 17,530% Gain)

There’s a good Google Group’s discussion about this here.

Wow!! As soon as I get some disposable “play money,” options trading looks like it could be fun or at least the closest thing to Vegas without actually being there. I wonder if there’s a conservative way to trade options? Would that be buying puts and calls? (At this point I only know enough about options to know that those things exist…for what purpose yet I don’t know.)

I just saw this post entitled, Words Matter, on one of the Google blogs that I follow. This new addition to Google News allows you to type in a person’s full name on the standard Google News search to display recent things that person said. Then you can even search within those, possibly thousands of quotes, for a quote that includes a specific word. For example, here’s a list of the quotes that John McCain made regarding Iraq. Seems like a pretty useful feature.

Improv Everywhere has done a bunch of cool stuff. In their recent mission, entitled Best Game Ever, they send a NBC major league filming crew/stage, the Goodyear Blimp, and a bunch of staged fans to a little league game in Hermosa Beach, California. This is what one mother wrote to Improv Everywhere:

I believe you guys are behind the “Hermosa Beach Little League” taping that took place Saturday, March 10th, 2007. The parents will be talking about this for a long time… the kids even longer. My son was a pitcher on the Lugnuts. We had a long/tough season last year. Saturday made up for everything. I want to sincerely thank you for making Saturday so unbelievable. It was like a birthday, Christmas, and New Years Eve captured in a few amazing hours. Thanks a million for a once in a lifetime opportunity.

The kids looked really excited. What an experience for them!

Here’s a story about a guy who attempted to visit all Starbucks stores in Manhattan in 24 hours.

Turns out, there are 176 stores in Manhattan, but a few of those, like the one in J.P. Morgan’s headquarters, are off limits to the public. So Malkoff, a comedian who works as the audience coordinator at The Colbert Report, set out to hit all the stores he could—171 of them—in 24 hours, saving his $369.14 in receipts to prove it.

And here’s the play-by-play diary of his adventures.

This blog has some more details and a video of feat. This guy writes, “What’s amazing about this, is not that someone was crazy enough to try such a feat - but the fact there are actually 171 Starbucks outlets packed into 23 square miles.”

This Spring Break I visited the Czech Republic. One of the most memorable days was the tour of the Terezin concentration camp. Hitler wanted this camp to serve as the “model” ghetto. For detailed information please visit the Jewish Virtual Library’s article on Terezin. I went with a group of friends and we were fortunate enough to get an English speaking tour guide just for our group of about 10. Below are some of the photos from that trip and information that the tour guide gave to us. Click each picture to read more detail about it. My entire collection of Terezin photos begin here.

On my recent trip to Prague, I used the auto-bracketing feature of my digital SLR to take a series of three photos that I later stitched together using Photomatix to form the final tone mapped HDR image. The collection of my tone mapped HDR photos starts here.

Resources I used:
Stuck In Customs >> HDR Tutorial
Vanilla Days : HDR Tutorial (Page not currently loading so text only Google cached version is shown.)
hdrphotos.net - HDR II (Page not currently loading so Google cached version is shown.)

You can make the photos have a very natural appearance to an almost cartoonish appearance. I have tried to keep my photos on the natural side, but a few are on the border. Basically with this post I just want to give a few examples to show how much more detail is available when HDR photos are made. These were all handheld and would have improved with the use of a tripod. Click the small photos below to enlarge them.
Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an interesting article regarding recently updated GDP calculations:

China, it turns out, isn’t a $10-trillion economy on the brink of catching up with the United States. It is a $6-trillion economy, less than half our size. For the foreseeable future, China will have far less money to spend on its military and will face much deeper social and economic problems at home than experts previously believed.

What happened to $4 trillion in Chinese gross domestic product?

Statistics. When economists calculate a country’s gross domestic product, they add up the prices of the goods and services its economy produces and get a total — in dollars for the United States, euros for such countries as Germany and France and yuan for China. To compare countries’ GDP, they typically convert each country’s product into dollars.

The simplest way to do this is to use exchange rates. In 2006, the World Bank calculated that China produced 21 trillion yuan worth of goods and services. Using the market exchange rate of 7.8 yuan to the dollar, the bank pegged China’s GDP at $2.7 trillion.

That number is too low. For one thing, like many countries, China artificially manipulates the value of its currency. For another, many goods in less developed economies such as China and Mexico are much cheaper than they are in countries such as the United States.

To take these factors into account, economists compare prices from one economy to another and compute an adjusted GDP figure based on “purchasing-power parity.” The idea is that a country’s GDP adjusted for purchasing-power parity provides a more realistic measure of relative economic strength and of living standards than the unadjusted GDP numbers.

Unfortunately, comparing hundreds and even thousands of prices in almost 150 economies all over the world is a difficult thing to do. Concerned that its purchasing-power-parity numbers were out of whack, the World Bank went back to the drawing board and, with help from such countries as India and China, reviewed the data behind its GDP adjustments.

It learned that there is less difference between China’s domestic prices and those in such countries as the United States than previously thought. So the new purchasing-power-parity adjustment is smaller than the old one — and $4 trillion in Chinese GDP melts into air.

Continue reading: “The great fall of China”

Traffic that grinds to a halt and then restarts for no apparent reason is one of the biggest causes of frustration for drivers. Now a team of Japanese researchers has recreated the phenomenon on a test-track for the first time.

The mathematical theory behind these so-called “shockwave” jams was developed more than 15 years ago using models that show jams appear from nowhere on roads carrying their maximum capacity of free-flowing traffic – typically triggered by a single driver slowing down.

After that first vehicle brakes, the driver behind must also slow, and a shockwave jam of bunching cars appears, travelling backwards through the traffic.

The theory has frequently been modelled in computer simulations, and seems to fit with observations of real traffic, but has never been recreated experimentally until now.

Shockwave traffic jam recreated for first time