The World Trade Report 2008

The World Trade Report 2008 is out. Its available for download here.

The theme of this year’s Report is “Trade in a Globalizing World”. The Report provides a reminder of what we know about the gains from international trade and highlights the challenges arising from higher levels of integration. It addresses a range of interlinking questions, starting with a consideration of what constitutes globalization, what drives it, what benefits does it bring, what challenges does it pose and what role does trade play in this world of ever-growing inter-dependency.

The Report asks why some countries have managed to take advantage of falling trade costs and greater policy-driven trading opportunities while others have remained largely outside international commercial relations. It also considers who the winners and losers are from trade and what complementary action is needed from policy-makers to secure the benefits of trade for society at large. In examining these complex and multi-faceted questions, the Report reviews both the theoretical gains from trade and empirical evidence that can help to answer these questions.

For those of us interested in trade patterns, this as good a resource as any. The UNCTAD report on Least Developed Countries too is a great resource.

The ‘I Hate Vista Snowball Effect’

Last week I became a part of the Snowball Effect group on Face book. The group is trying a social experiment to illustrate the snowball effect which is the long-standing phenomenon that people follow what others do.

The ‘Mojave Experiment‘ put together by a Microsoft research team illustrates this idea nicely. The “Mojave Experiment” is an attempt to find out -

What do people think of Windows Vista® when they don’t know it’s Windows Vista? We disguised Windows Vista as codename ‘Mojave,’ the ‘next Microsoft OS,’ so regular people who’ve never used Windows Vista could see what it can do – and decide for themselves. …

Results from the experiment indicate that over 90% of users rated Vista much better than they did based on preconceived notions.

For most part, Vista works very well for me- sure it has annoying parts like every Windows system has had in the past, the real question is; Are we all sheep?

People for The Eating of Tasty Animals!

Hypocrisy is the mother of all credibility problems, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has it in spades. While loudly complaining about the “unethical” treatment of animals by restaurant owners, grocers, farmers, scientists, anglers, and countless other Americans, the group has its own dirty little secret.

PETA kills animals. By the thousands.

From July 1998 through December 2007, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) killed over 19,200 dogs, cats, and other “companion animals.” That’s more than five defenseless creatures every day. PETA has a walk-in freezer to store the dead bodies, and contracts with a Virginia Beach company to cremate them.

Not counting the pets PETA spayed and neutered, the group put to death over 90 percent of the animals it took in during the last five years. And its angel-of-death pattern shows no sign of changing.

Click here for the full story, and then go figure!