Seed: Girl Shortage Could Cause Rise in Crime:
The authors assert that over the next 20 years, in parts of China and India, there will be a 12 to 15 percent excess of young men—men who will have to remain single in societies that also place a high value on marriage. Because women will be able to select high status males to marry, the men who remain single are most likely to be members of the lower classes or those who are otherwise undesirable.

These unmarried, low-status males are the people most likely to be perpetrators of violent crime, the authors suggest. Previous research has shown a strong correlation between sex ratio and violence.

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the lumpenproletariot will lead the revolution? to what… we’ve seen this demographic shift in the past, and yes, two factors increase in male youth and unmarried males both contribute significantly to crime rate… what we’ve not seen is this sort of ’scale’ of problem.

The Globalist | Global Economy — U.S. Universities and Global Competition:
Traditional assumptions about who can and should attend college are no longer adequate, if we are to remain competitive.

Without the economic success that is the product of education, we as a nation may face a reduction in our quality of life in the next generation, something unheard of in our past.

To avert what sometimes appears to me an impending societal train wreck, education must become the central focus of our society.

In China, I witnessed an unprecedented effort now underway to build from scratch approximately 100 research universities.

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larger population means larger talent pool, larger talent pool means more possible genius’s and innovators… the question becomes whether that can be centralized through universities in china, much like the u.s. did in the 50’s-60’s or not.

Yesterday, the Pratt Manhattan Library started the first of what I hope will be a very long tradition of hosting the September Project, we had a good sized audience for the starting event and 3 speakers. Professor Bencivengo presented on the Patriot Act and the ethical issues it raises. Professor Rabina presented on the recent practices and legal aspects of security classified information, specifically the movement to reclassify documents that were previously released. I spoke to the broader issues of where the normative foundations of information professional and librarians might lie in the digital age through my presentation on cosmopolitan democracy: dissent and informational power. Our librarian, Jean Hines, did an excellent job in pulling this effort together and I look forward to working with her on the September Project in the future. Thanks also go to David Silver and his colleagues at University of Washington for imagining the project and providing the network of information that makes it interesting and successful.