Rotundus.com

Over the past decade or so the Catholic church has encountered some needed criticism over it's mishandling of instances of sex abuse, but running across a story entitled Children in care not protected against sexual abuse: report yesterday as part of my normal newsreading reminded me that it's not just the Roman Catholic church that has problems with this sort of thing.

Here, for example, are a couple of reports from the New York Times over the last twenty years touching on child sex abuse in the foster care system. Here's a brief excerpt of the first:

... though the majority of foster parents are excellent, evidence of widespread abuse in foster care is overwhelming.

A Baltimore study found abuse in 28 percent of the homes examined. A second Baltimore study found four times the number of substantiated reports of sexual abuse in foster care as in the general population. And when alumni of what is said to be an exemplary, model foster care program in the Pacific Northwest were questioned, 24 percent of the girls said they were victims of actual or attempted sexual abuse in their foster homes.

Similarly here's another article on the subject about a decade later:

In certain counties of New Jersey in 2001, nearly one in five children who were placed in what state officials considered their most promising foster homes nonetheless wound up abused or seriously neglected, according to the state's own statistics.

Those rates of abuse, in the financially pressed counties surrounding Newark, are some 30 times what national experts have said is tolerable for any child welfare system.

It's not just a Roman Catholic problem - though they did mishandle quite a few such cases - but rather a more general problem. Is the Roman Catholic church's non-spectacular record better or worse than the records of some of these more-secular organizations? I'm not sure.

I'd also make more or less the same case as that first New York Times article's headline asserted: Foster Care's Horrors Argue for Intact Families. You have to consider not only the risk of not taking action in removing children from somewhat questionable parents but also the high risk involved in taking action. Typically people seem to prefer action over inaction, but such may in maybe cases be an irrational and harmful path to tread. (And here I'm haven't even yet gotten to the expense of taking action... just the risk to the child of doing so).

As Online Courses Grow, Sites Offering Unauthorized Academic Help Get More Brazen

"Plenty of Web sites offer to write students’ papers or complete their assignments for a fee. But they appear to be growing more aggressive in promising to get students good grades for no work; some even promise to take entire online courses for students."

You Waste A Lot Of Time At Work

"Just because you're at work doesn't mean you're getting work done. You're drowning in email, stuck in dead-end meetings, and constantly interrupted. When do you have time to do any real work? Don't worry. You're not alone." An infographic.

Is Economic Growth Coming to an End?

"How Robert Gordon Misreads the Data and What It Tells Us About the Dismal Science" - basically Roger Pilkie in this piece argues that there hasn't been the consistent downtrend in GDP-growth that a popular article this summer argued. He also argues that even social troubles as nasty as the black death didn't stop per-capita economic growth.

Do Cold Feet Warn of Trouble Ahead? Premarital Uncertainty and Four-Year Marital Outcomes.

"Are the doubts that people feel before marriage signs of impending difficulties or normative experiences that can be safely ignored? ... Doubts were reported by at least one partner in two thirds of couples. Women with premarital doubts had significantly higher 4-year divorce rates, even when controlling for concurrent marital satisfaction, the difficulty of their engagement, history of parental divorce, premarital cohabitation, and neuroticism. Among intact couples, men's and women's doubts predicted less satisfied marital trajectories. Premarital doubts appear to be common but not benign, suggesting that valid precursors of marital distress are evident during couples' engagements."

That was the proposition recently debated at Intelligence Squared. Generally these eventually wind up on both NPR and PBS in some (typically abbreviated) form, but the video of the full debate has already made it to YouTube:

You can find the results of the debate's voting at the link above or just watch the thing.

So far the situation in Egypt has turned out slightly better than I expected, but I'm still fairly cynical about the "Arab Spring."

At the moment Bangladesh is about 90% Islamic, and seems to exhibit a fairly high degree of social hostility towards non-Islamic religions but the country operates as a secular democracy. On the other hand, Turkey (~98% Islamic) seems to be getting less secular.

What’s a Congregation Worth?

"Does a congregation’s tax-exempt status outweigh the economic value it adds to its community? The University of Pennsylvania’s Ram Cnaan has long been searching for a specific answer. In a 1997 study, he found that urban congregations provide, on average, $140,000 worth of services annually. In 2009, Cnaan (who describes himself as nonreligious) revised his estimate to $476,663.24. Now he’s about to release an even more detailed pilot study focusing on 12 historic Philadelphia congregations, including First Baptist Church, whose annual value to the local economy Cnaan’s team places conservatively at $6,090,032 (nearly ten times its annual budget)." I'm still generally opposing to tax exemptions or subsidies for religious organizations - even if they do add some economic value to the community.

How technology is killing the Asian growth miracle

Basically with robots replacing labour there's not the wage differential incentive to outsource and high fuel costs push more towards localization of manufacturing.

Superweeds, Superpests: The Legacy of Pesticides

How we reach the point where insects have adapted such that genetically engineered crops now require more pesticides that non-genetically engineered varieties?

World Happiness Report

How can you measure happiness? Should you replace measures like GDP with measures of happiness as the primary means of comparing countries? How does happiness compare between countries?