Juan Convers

I have to confess I had never heard about the Zika virus until I started reading about it in some Colombian newspaper articles a couple of weeks ago. The outbreak of this virus in South America and the Caribbean has been in the international news lately because infection in pregnant women is unfortunately associated with microcephaly cases.

The incidence of those malformations has increased substantially in Brazil and it is apparently related to Zika, so there are now travel warnings in place to the countries affected by this virus:

This morning I was reading the Corruption Perceptions Index 2015 published by Transparency International (transparency.org). This organization fights for a world in which government, business, civil society and the daily lives of people are free of corruption and publishes this report that quantifies perceptions of corruption in the public sector and normalizes the data from multiple countries in an index from 0 (the most corrupt) to 100 (the least corrupt).

In South America, Chile and Uruguay had the highest scores, while Venezuela had the lowest.

Yesterday I was reading the news about Apple: On Tuesday they reported the financial results of their fiscal first quarter. One of the conclusions from this event is that even if they had record profits, on the other hand the iPhone sales rose less than 1 percent from a year earlier.

I was checking the Mobile & Tablet operating systems market share data published by netmarketshare.net and this downward trend is clear:

I never owned an iPhone. I really like the quality of the hardware and software produced by this company (In fact I'm writing this post on a MacBook Air), but I don't like the closed, restricted ecosystem associated with their business model. It's refreshing to see so many different Android devices on the market.

One of the constant topics in the news are the mass shootings in the United States and the debates related to gun control, the 2nd amendment of their constitution and the almost impossible effort to regulate this market. This is particularly true now that they have presidential elections at the end of this year.

So how does gun ownership in this country compare to the rest of the world (gun ownership per 100 inhabitants):

I guessed the USA had the highest gun ownership rate and that turned out to be true, but I never realized how high it was. It seems crazy to me that a country has more firearms than inhabitants! The Washington Post has an interesting article where they discuss this issue.

The central office of statistics in Ireland website cso.ie has some interesting data tables that can be downloaded, so yesterday I decided to pull out the unemployment data and plot it.

I was curious because when I arrived to the country the economy was doing really well, but I saw the changes during the crisis of 08. I thought it would be interesting to see what happened in the last years. Even if the unemployment level hasn't yet reached the numbers of 2005, I think the trend is definitely positive.

Next page