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facts & arguments

Beware of prophets

That guy who called the big one? Don't listen to him, Joe Keohane advises in The Boston Globe. Last fall, Oxford economist Jerker Denrell and colleague Christina Fang of New York University studied the forecasting records of about 50 economists, compiled by The Wall Street Journal. They calculated which economists had the best record of correctly predicting "extreme" outcomes, defined for the study as either 20 per cent higher or 20 per cent lower than the average prediction. "What they found was striking. Economists who had a better record at predicting extreme events had a worse record in general. 'The analyst with the largest number as well as the highest proportion of accurate and extreme forecasts,' they wrote, 'had, by far, the worst forecasting record.' "How many will there be?

"Before the 20th century, no human had lived through a doubling of the human population but there are people alive today who have seen it triple," Robert Kunzig writes for National Geographic magazine. The population explosion "though it is slowing, is far from over. Not only are people living longer, but so many women across the world are now in their child-bearing years - 1.8 billion - that the global population will keep growing for another few decades at least, even though each woman is having fewer children than she would have had a generation ago. By 2050, the total number could reach 10.5 billion, or it could stop at eight billion - the difference is about one child per woman."

Crowd control

Men and women have been banned from shaking hands in a district of Somalia controlled by the Islamist group al-Shabab, BBC News reports. Under the ban imposed in the southern town of Jowhar, men and women who are not related are also barred from walking together or chatting in public. The BBC's Mohamed Moalimuu in Mogadishu says the penalty for breaking the law would probably be a public flogging.

Tank? What tank?

British military scientists plan to develop an army of "invisible" tanks ready for use on the battlefield within five years, The Sunday Telegraph reports. "Armoured vehicles will use a new technology known as 'e-camouflage' which deploys a form of 'electronic ink' to render a vehicle 'invisible.' Highly sophisticated electronic sensors attached to the tank's hull will project images of the surrounding environment back onto the outside of the vehicle. … Unlike conventional forms of camouflage, the images on the hull would change in concert with the changing environment, always insuring that the vehicle remains disguised." Scientists are also close to developing a form of transparent armour - much tougher than bullet-proof glass - which could be used in turrets on the sides of armoured vehicles to improve the situational awareness of troops inside.

Pot-bellied vermin?

As North Americans increasingly swap a healthy diet for packaged processed foods, so do foxes, raccoons and opossums living closer to us, research shows, according to United Press International. "Such animals living close to urban areas are more often finding leftovers from fast-food outlets, rather than chasing down their normal diet of mice, rats and birds, an article published in the December issue of the Journal of Mammology says. A study of endangered San Joaquin kit foxes in and around Bakersfield, Calif., found a growing number of them eating the same things as humans, particularly corn syrup. … Urban foxes had significantly higher carbon and lower nitrogen values than their non-urban counterparts from adjacent areas, and city-dwelling foxes showed higher cholesterol levels than their country cousins, the journal article said."

The upside of bitter cold

"My late father, who had something good to say about most things, used to console people who complained about bitter cold weather by reminding them of the joys of a hot bowl of soup and of a strong drink made permissible early in the day by the extraordinary circumstances," Serbian-American poet Charles Simic writes for The New York Review of Books. "In addition, he claimed that the cold concentrates the mind. The moment we step outdoors, we do what we have to do with uncommon intelligence and dispatch, unlike those folks who can afford to sit in the shade on some Mediterranean or Caribbean island. … History, [Romanian writer Emil Cioran]said, is the product of people who stand up and get busy."

Thought du jour

"The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now." - W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), English author

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