Pardon me, marriages of adult with 9 year old girls are NOT something that has occurred "in the past". If the man in question lives in Saudi Arabia, it is PERFECTLY LEGAL for him to marry such a young girl.

In fact, muslims are NOT ashamed of their prophet has been married to a girl. If you don`t believe, just read the wikipedia entry about Aisha, or the one about child marriage.

Truth is, many more child marriages occur in India, but there the government is trying to stop it. On Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, it is considered absolutely normal and holy to marry a child. A movie depicting the relationship of Muhammad and Aisha would be considered disgusting in the west, and would not raise much controversy on the islamic countries.

Every time I learn a little more about Saudi Arabia or the Islam, I get a little more nauseated.

Syria has been a de facto "gun-included" country for the past months. Everybody, and their brother, carries a weapon there, and on June more than 2,5 thousand people died there (an average of more than 90 people per day). To put things in perspective: for every fatal victim of this shooting, 7 syrians died EVERY DAY. And this was repeated for several months, and the killings there are still happening. Sorry, but this teorethical cenario is not convincing to me, considering current events and historical examples, on United States and other countries.

Are you sure that european companies are benefiting from the current economic downturn? Companies are selling less, and earnings are going downhill. It will take some times for european companies to benefit from the depreciation of the euro against the dollar (with an increase in exports), but the negative effects are felt immediatly: suplies get more expensive, and the purchasing power of consumers diminish.

Nokia has been taking a hard hit, mostly because of its management. But the bad economic climate in the world, specially in Europe, is not helping any european company.

That is exactly what Marshall McLuhan wrote about in the seventies, but people didn't understand then. The "global village" is like a village where you find only people that think like you, but are dispersed around the globe. In fact, there are thousands of global villages, with populations that can from 10 (you obscure blog of choice) to hundred thousands (Slashdot or Facebook), and all these villages have little connections between them. If you can out for too much time in one particular village, chances are that your views will become increasingly extreme and diverge from the “mainstream”.

You need 500.000 experiments toverify that a number is random? Do you need to interview 500.000 people to know who will be elected president? Seriously, where have you studied Statistics? It seems it was not your favorite subject.

He was not exactly a scientist, but was very close to what you would call a "science hero". He helped to improve the aqualung, used by every diver (including for scientific research), and did a pretty good job of science communication for a broad audience. Much before Myth Busters, Costeau was making nature documentaries that were broadcasted on National TV. He also raised public awareness of human impacts on the sea, and of the ecology in general. That is a hero!

I have used two programs for Statistical Analysis that have one advantage of R: both are free, nad part of the GNU project. Of course, both have disadvantages.

1) PSPP - a free alternative to SPSS. It does not have every option as SPSS, but in my opinion is fairly complete and has a lot of power. It is just like "click click. There is the average, the median, the standard deviaton, my null hypothesis cannot be rejected, let`s go back to work".

2) Gretl - Gnu Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library - a great tool for econometric analysis. If you are interested only in econometrics, I find it much more powerful than PSPP. If you are an R guru, you can use Gretl (which can be operated from a GUI or a CLI) for most calculations and, whenever you find a dead end, send the data to R.

For me, R is an incredible beast that I would like to tame. But programs like PSPP or Gretl (and SPSS, eViews, etc) can help me in so many situations that I don`t find myself needing R that much.

You are right, is not freedom of speech, but of press. And to have a "legal" newspaper you should have at least one person with a journalism registry in the Labor Ministry, and you should send one copy of the newspaper to the National Library. There are not much safeguards to freedom of speech online, if a dictator get the presidency.

But foreigners, don’t be alarmed. No one follow these laws in Brasil nowadays. No one follow any law in Brazil anyway, and that’s why this country is not in the position it should be.

You will probably read some comments bellow “defending” Brazil against an “offense” made by an American. As a brazilian, this sort of attitude only embarrass me.

Brazilian libel and slander laws suck. Period. As a country, we don’t value that much freedom of speech (although we speak on the contrary). When you read the brazilian constitution you can find an article that states: “Freedom of speech is guaranteed in our country”. With an addendum: “But anonymity is forbidden”.

The decision of the judge only reflects this doctrine that bans anonymity and makes difficult the job of whistleblowers.

This has some interesting consequences. For instance, brazilian companies that have stock options in the NY Stock Exchange have great difficulties to comply to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Sox). Sox says the company MUST have procedures to allow anonymous complaints, but brazilian laws says that you are NOW ALLOWED to make anonymous complaints. Talk about Cath 66, he?

They use less resources in part because they have a smaller income (use of energy is a a positive function of the income). But it is not evident that they are more efficient (from the article - "In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, people leave their lights on all day).

A positive side of most slums is that the streets are so narrow that you cannot drive a car through them, only walk, ride a bike or a motorcycle. The streets are narrow because it was a more efficient use of the land, but now the resident druglords like this “feature” because it makes some areas of the slum inaccessible to police cars. And crime is a big problem in slums, and it spreads to the streets surrounding it.

If more crime is a trade-off to a little less of CO2 emission of cars, I choose more emissions and less crime. But this is only my personal preference.

Models are created not to be exact replicas of the realities, but because they are easier to understand and manipulate than the reality - think of a car model, opposed to a car. From these models, we derive logic conclusions that are valid in reality . Eg: ceteris paribus, a reduction in the quantity of a good suplied to a market will make the price increase, for any quantity demanded.

I would say that most microeconomic models I have studied are consistent and "good enough". If you study most modern management theories, microeconomics is a very important foundation.

Macroeconomy, on the other hand, is still a field where the models are still not good enough, an there are a lot of changes in each decade or so. For instance, the Nobel Award for Stiglitz et ali, for the models that take in account Information asymmetry, was awarded in 2001!

Think of economic models as "physics", and applied economics (what the Fed or the government does) as "engineering". If an engineer builds a bridge and it colapses, nobody would claim that Newton or the gravity theory was wrong.