Ubuntu 9.04!!!

Download it here!

I'm back...

The conference was great. It was terrific to spend 3 days among economic historians. Soon I will write posts about the work of the colleagues that I met there.
Now I am back to real life. Yet no symptoms of the flu.
(By the way, the post bellow was already scheduled before the outbreak. Just plain coincidence.)

The Map of the Plague

Aqui. Hat tip Rafael P.
What happened in Milan? Google says that there "city officials immediately walled up houses found to have the plague, isolating the healthy in them along with the sick". Ouch.

More or Less by Tim Harford

A new series of one my favorite radio shows. In the first show Tim Harford investigates the costs drug prohibition.

Latin American Economies: History and Globalization

Conference sponsored by the Center for Economic History da UCLA. I am going to LA in a few hours and I'll back on Monday. The conference papers are available for download.

Is the crisis over?

Nicholas Bloom forecasted the 2009 crisis (take a look at his cool graph of stock market volatility since 1880). Now he says that uncertainty is falling and recovery in on the way.

Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists, and the End of Slavery in Brazil: Correspondence 1880-1905

The Institute for the Study of the Americas is pleased to invite you to the launch of

Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists and the End of Slavery in Brazil
edited by Leslie Bethell and José Murilo de Carvalho

Wednesday 22 April at 4.30pm
Venue: Conference Room, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, Charles Clore House, 17 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DR

Contact: olga.jiemenz@sas.ac.uk or 020 7862 8871

A little studied aspect of the struggle to abolish slavery in Brazil in the 1880s is the relationship established and maintained between Joaquim Nabuco, the leading Brazilian abolitionist, and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in London. The correspondence between Nabuco and Charles Harris Allen, Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, and other British abolitionists throughout the decade and beyond reveals a partnership consciously sought by Nabuco in order to internationalise the struggle. These letters provide a unique insight into the evolution of Nabuco's thinking on both slavery and abolition and at the same time a running commentary on the slow and (at least until 1887) uncertain progress of the abolitionist cause in Brazil.

Leslie Bethell is Emeritus Professor of Latin American History at the University of London, Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, Senior Research Fellow at the Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil, Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. He is an Honorary Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of the Americas.

José Murilo de Carvalho is Professor of History at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

Compre na Amazon aqui (US$30).

The bank that had Christopher Columbus account

Banco di San Giorgio was the creator of:
- Government bonds;
- Double-entry book-keeping;
among many other things....
(a Giuseppe Felloni's bilingual book about the bank is available here for free)

Markets in Everything ... maybe not

"Somewhere out there is a company that has actually figured out how to enlarge penises, and it is helpless to reach out potential consumers"

xkcd

Cambridge Centre for Quantitative Economic History

Maybe I've already blogged about this group, but here it goes.
By the way, I finally updated the blogroll.

Historical National Accounts

Aqui.
(HT Shikida)

Useful links for a world in crisis

Sourcetone: a music therapy on-line radio. (listeners outside the US face limitations);
Taxi fare calculator: World and Brazil. (HT: Ricardo Freire);
Ubuntu Pocket Guide;
Quick R: R for stata, spss and SAS users;
Vuze: by far the best torrent client for Windows and Linux;
Monty Python - The Movies (6 Disc Box Set) for 11 GBP (16 USD)!

The Effect of Prayer on God's Attitude Toward Mankind

"This paper uses data available from the National Opinion Research Center's (NORC) survey on religious attitudes and powerful statistical methods to evaluate the effect of prayer on the attitude of God toward human beings."

James Heckman has a great sense of humor.

Great Depression versus 2008 Crisis

Eichengreen and O'Rourke bring good and bad news:

To summarize: the world is currently undergoing an economic shock every bit as big as the Great Depression shock of 1929-30. Looking just at the US leads one to overlook how alarming the current situation is even in comparison with 1929-30.
The good news, of course, is that the policy response is very different. The question now is whether that policy response will work. For the answer, stay tuned for our next column.

(The graphs are awesome)

Economics 2.0 by Häring and Storbeck

The book aims the non-specialist curious about the last decade of results from the Economics research (mainly empirical). It covers some topics that other economics-for-the-masses-books also deal: Behavioral Economics, Economics of Happiness, Discrimination, Game Theory. Moreover, it is has chapters on: Anthropometric History, History of Globalization, Efficient Market Hypothesis, Economics of Sports and even a chapter on the subprime crisis.

Highly recommended for non-specialists and for over specialized economists drowning in pdf's an willing to have an overview of other areas.

(Disclosure: I received the book as a gift from the editors.)

Conference on Quantitative Social Science Research Using R

Here.

It is really strange world...

when I just can not notice anymore what it is April fool's day or true science.