Uncle Sam teaches terrorism. In the early 80’s the CIA published a sabotage manual and distributed it throughout Nicaragua. The anti-Sandanista pamphlet is full of tips on bringing down the infrastructure of the country…

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Yesterday’s Tomorrows – a web gallery of the American future as envisioned in the early-to-mid 20th Century. This kind of stuff has always entertained me.

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Foreign Policy and the Centre for Global Development have produced an interesting “generosity league table” which balances rich countries’ aid, trade, investment and environmental policies to measure their overall effect on poorer nations. (I think it’s a mistake to put in a measure of environmental impact alongside the other straight economic measures, but let that pass).

Japan, which I always thought of as one of the good guys (it was until recently the largest foreign aid donor) turns out to be at the bottom of their league table because they don’t welcome foreign goods or workers and the large past aid loans are balanced by large debt repayments by poor countries.

Turns out the most generous countries are Denmark and the Netherlands and (to my surprise) Portugal, New Zealand and Switzerland. The UK is, “Consistently middling across categories, and dead center—11th—in the overall standings” while Canada’s extensive participation in peacekeeping operations is undercut by low aid and high greenhouse gas emissions – it ends up just 18th out of the 21 countries surveyed. The US is second lowest of developed countries – only Japan scores worse.

Of course you could change the weightings and come up with a different league table but still I think this table is thought provoking.one monitoring 3 in creditscore one 3 credit inneed credit american consumerstax 2007 federal creditaccreditation healthand credit services education americaneducation accounting credit5 card credit start Maptechnician psychiatric in schools california accreditedonline aba degree accredited lawcredit affinity in mn unionsunion utah america ogden credit firstchase aarp card credit bankarea cosmetic accredited in bay dentistveterinarian at-home degrees accreditedcredit american personal card express Map

An MSNBC investigation shows that although big companies themselves may not spam they don’t seem to do much to prevent affiliates from spamming on their behalf and passing the results on as sales leads at $10-20 per respondent.payday companies 6 4 advance loanloan payday 5 free 7loan 500 personal57 loans student6 payday 8 loan 123personal loan 6 easy loan paydaycalifornia officers loan certification 63 3fast pay payday loan 8 day Map

Here’s a story that makes my teeth grind with frustration – leaked order logs from a spammer selling $50 bottles of penis enlargement pills show around 6,000 people responded to the messages over one month alone. This Wired article goes into detail – some of it eventually tedious but usually grimly fascinating – about the kind of people who do make these purchases. Somehow they even managed to get one of these morons to talk about why – “there was a picture on the top of the page that said, ‘As Seen on TV,’ and I guess that made me think it was legit,” said a San Diego salesman”.

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There are several sites available to let you compare your favourite nations to one another online. Each has its merits and specialties so if you don’t find what you want from one, try one of the others.

NationMaster – the one I found out about most recently – lets you look at statistics in hundreds of different categories. Earlier I found the similar Your Nation.com – which relies on rather old CIA Fact Book data (1998) – and the UN’s “Infonation” aimed particularly at schoolkids which has a somewhat eccentric navigation system and a shorter list of countries to compare. It’s a pity someone doesn’t make a comparative database like these but which is dynamically linked to the latest sources of information – these while interesting will become increasingly out of date.

If you want to dig deeper Offstats provides a database of links to official statistics from several countries across the Internet, but without the whizzy direct comparison engine.

One key measure missing is the UN’s ever-popular quality of life (“Human Development”) index (report / index in PDF form). Of course how you score a country depends on what you value – one could come up with a different ranking with different criteria – but it’s always interesting to see how different countries fare. Canada long valued its top position through much of the 1990s (it dropped to 8th this year – behind the US(!)) and I notice the EU is blowing its own trumpet with six of the top ten countries.

The State Department’s assessment of the cost of living in many world cities is also entertaining, though it seems to find most places more expensive to live in than Washington DC which suggests to me that the “basket” of goods and services they use to generate the index is a little skewed.

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If you are a journalist you have almost certainly seen this cryptic text: “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. In dapibus magna et velit…” etc.
lipsum.com collects in one place information about the origins of this text – used in place of actual copy when pages are being laid out – and provides a way to automatically generate as much of the dummy text as you need.

I just got around to seeing ”
Catch Me If You Can” – the somewhat Hollywood-ised but still fascinating story of Frank Abagnale, who stole $2m over five years starting at age 16 and impersonated a doctor, a lawyer and a pilot among other professions. I reviewed it for Epinions (I have earned $24 so far from them and need to earn another $76 before they cut me a cheque so go take a look!)

Frank – who now runs a successful anti-fraud business – gives his impressions of the movie on his own site. He was also interviewed at length in Australia well before the movie’s release and tells a number of the movie’s best stories there.

Here’s a tip of his you won’t get from the movie: “if I’m going to mail a letter and I don’t have a stamp, you know, I can take that letter and address the person’s name in the left-hand corner I’m sending it to, and put my name in the middle of the envelope and the mail will return back to that person, and I’ve sent it without a stamp”number card credit american expressgift card certificate credit $100accreditation united in the statesmedical record requirements accreditationdiploma school high home at accreditedschools online high accreditedaccredited acr facilitiesassurance and quality accreditation Map

When someone quotes you a figure for the number of weblogs there are around, you should mentally be subtracting at least a third to account for weblogs that are no longer active – at least according to figures from the NITLE blog census discussed once again by blogcount. I would expect this proportion to rise somewhat over time – at the moment I imagine the weblog phenomenon is still growing fast enough that a large number of users are new ones. If they become disenchanted and the rate of new entries begins to fall the proportion of “live” weblogs to dead ones may fall.
Thanks to Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka weblog for the link

After producing an excellent study on what people on low incomes want from the Internet (easy-to-read, relevant content) and what they get, the Children’s Partnership has produced a follow-up paper for the Community Technology Review called Closing the Content Gap: A Content Evaluation and Creation Starter Kit which brings together some useful resources and gives a brief overview of projects like Firstfind which are being trialled at NY public libraries – a virtual library that provides information to low-level readers and adults with limited English skills. (Also see starthere.org a UK charity trying to do a similar job but using kiosks).