Fascinating Facts and Trivia.

Visualizing Inequality Through Transit

While increased disparity in income is readily apparent in the United States, it’s often difficult to visualize it. The New Yorker offered anidea-subwayinequality-290 interesting take, showing median income at various transit stops in New York City:

The United States has a problem with income inequality. And it’s particularly bad in New York City—according to recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau, if the borough of Manhattan were a country, the income gap between the richest twenty per cent and the poorest twenty per cent would be on par with countries like Sierra Leone, Namibia, and Lesotho.

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Cuban Economy Down, Cuban Health Up

The Atlantic is reporting on a fascinating study conducted in Cuba, which revealed that the health of the Cuban people actually improved following the country’s economic collapse:

The economic meltdown should logically have been a public health disaster. But a new study conducted jointly by university researchers in Spain, Cuba, and the U.S. and published in the latest issue of BMJ says that the health of Cubans actually improved dramatically during the years of austerity. These surprising findings are based on nationwide statistics from the Cuban Ministry of Public Health, together with surveys conducted with about 6,000 participants in the city of Cienfuegos, on the southern coast of Cuba, between 1991 and 2011. The data showed that, during the period of the economic crisis, deaths from cardiovascular disease and adult-onset type 2 diabetes fell by a third and a half, respectively. Strokes declined more modestly, and overall mortality rates went down.

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Most Challenged Books of 2012

The American Library Association has listed its most challenged books for 2012:

The office said it received 464 reports in 2012, up from 326 in 2011. The books on the most frequently challenged list are “Fifty Shades of Grey” by EL James; “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” by Sherman Alexie; “The Kite Runner,” by Khaled Hosseini; “Looking for Alaska,” by John Green; “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls; “Beloved” by Toni Morrison; “Thirteen Reasons Why,” by Jay Asher; the “Scary Stories” series by Alvin Schwartz; the “Captain Underpants” series by Dav Pilkey; and “And Tango Makes Three,” a young-adult book about two male penguins at the Central Park zoo who became a couple, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson.

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Are We Living in the Age of Angst?

Medical historian Edward Shorter thinks we certainly might be—and that much of the blame can be laid on psychiatrists:

Shorter believes that the increase in depression is more a problem of an expanding diagnosis and a surge in self-labeling than a genuine epidemic. Serious mental illness certainly exists, but is often misdiagnosed and ineffectively treated with Prozac-type drugs. He indignantly concludes that "psychiatry’s inability to stop the depression epidemic is an appalling story of the collective failure of a scientific discipline to ward off a public-health disaster." Abdication to Big Pharma "means that poorly diagnosed patients are denied the benefit of proper treatment." Ironically, however, Shorter’s solution to the disaster is not a return to the holistic concept of nerves, but the development of new and better drugs.

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Addicted to Farmville? Blame Your Brain

If you can’t seem to stop checking your Facebook feed, it may be a compulsion beyond your control. The Atlantic notes that Internet companies are following the model of tobacco companies–making their products so addictive that you can’t stop:

The leaders of Internet companies face an interesting, if also morally questionable, imperative: either they hijack neuroscience to gain market share and make large profits, or they let competitors do that and run away with the market.

In the Industrial Age, Thomas Edison famously said, "I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent." In the Internet Age, more and more companies live by the mantra "create an obsession, then exploit it." Gaming companies talk openly about creating a "compulsion loop," which works roughly as follows: the player plays the game; the player achieves the goal; the player is awarded new content; which causes the player to want to continue playing with the new content and re-enter the loop.

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