Freedom on the Net 2013

Freedom House has conducted a study on internet freedom in 60 countries across the globe.

What the authors of the study found is that global internet freedom has deteriorated in the last three years as a consequence of the increase of laws and regulations that try to limit free speech on the web.

An estimated 34 countries have seen a decline in internet freedom since 2012 including Vietnam, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Venezuela. On the other hand, 16 countries have seen an improvement in internet freedom, among them Morocco, Burma, and Tunisia. Despite those improvements, limits on internet freedom are still rampant in many countries that make the list, where censorship, threats, and murder of bloggers and users who post information governments see as a threat continues.

Source: Freedom House: Freedom on the Net 2013

Most Visited Website per Country

Google, Facebook, and Chinese search engine Baidu are the top three most visited websites in the world.

Using freely available website traffic statistics from Alexa, the authors of the map above found that most people in North America, Europe, South East Asia, and Oceania prefer Google. Due to the large number of Internet users in China and South Korea combined, an estimated one billion users, Baidu is the most visited website behind Google. Facebook comes in third with an estimated 280 million users spread from Latin America to the Middle East.

Source: Information Geographies: Age of Internet Empires

Europe’s Loss-Making Cars

European car makers are having a hard time with some of their models, which have generated big losses for the industry in the region. Here is a chart that shows European car manufacturers, their respective loss-making models, and how much money they lost per model.

Source: The Economist: Zoom, sputter, aagghhh!! – The biggest loss-making cars in Europe

Countries With Chemical Weapons

The 1925 Geneva Protocol banned the use of chemical weapons in warfare. By 1993 the Chemical Weapons Convention asked signatory nations to destroy their existing chemical weapons stockpiles and stop producing new ones.

Of the signatories, the United States and Russia are the two countries with the largest chemical weapon stockpiles. Currently, they are in the process of destroying them. Among the signatory states that have not yet ratified the Convention we find Israel and Myanmar. States that have not signed the Convention include Angola, Egypt, North Korea, South Sudan, and Syria.

Source: International Business Times: Not Just Syria: Which Other Countries Have Chemical Weapons? [Interactive Map]

Women’s Earnings by State

Comparing the median earnings of full-time employed women to the median earnings of full-time employed men in the U.S., we can see there is still a gender pay gap, where women earn 77 cents per each dollar earned by their white male counterparts. This number has remained unchanged for the last ten years.

In some states women earn slightly more. That is the case for the states of Nevada (84 cents per dollar), California, Vermont, and New York. On the other side of the spectrum, there are states where women earn much less than the median. That is the case of Wyoming (64 cent per dollar), and Louisiana (67 cents per dollar).

Source: Forbes: The Geography Of The Gender Pay Gap: Women’s Earnings By State

The Most Honest Cities in the World

Reader’s Digest conducted an experiment where a total of 192 wallets were lost in 16 cities around the world, about 12 wallets per city, to see how many of those would be returned to their rightful owners. Each wallet contained cash, credit cards, and the owner’s contact information.

The results show the most honest cities as Helsinki (Finland) and Mumbai (India). On the other hand, cities where the fewer number of lost wallets were returned to their owners include Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Zurich (Switzerland), Madrid (Spain), and Lisbon (Portugal).

Source: International Business Times: Most Honest Cities In The World: The Lost Wallet Experiment [Infographic]

Hardworking People in the World

In some countries people work really hard and in others they don’t. In the map above we can see that countries where people are the most hardworking (orange) include Mexico, South Korea, and Chile, while countries where people just take it easy (blue) include France, Germany, Italy, and Norway.

This map was elaborated for OECD countries only. To get this numbers the author took into consideration the average annual hours worked per person and the average age of retirement per worker for each OECD country.

Source: Business Insider: MAP: Here Are The Countries That Work Hard And The Ones Where They Like To Relax

Syrian Refugees in 2013

Since the armed conflict began in Syria, an estimated 100,000 people have been killed, and as many as 2 million people had fled the nation seeking refuge in neighboring countries. The majority of the refugees had fled to neighboring Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan. Egypt and Iraq have seen an influx of Syrian refugees as well.

Additionally, another 4 million people had been internally displaced, roughly 1 of every 4 inhabitants, including an estimated 2 million children.

Source: PBS: Syrian Refugees

Parts of the World With No McDonald’s

If you travel outside the United States the likelihood that you will find a McDonald’s is very high. However, there are still many countries that do not have one. Such is the case of most South Saharan African countries, with the exception of South Africa, Botswana, and Kenya; Iran, Syria, Turkmenistan, and Afghanistan in the Middle East; Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Papua New Guinea in Asia; Cuba, Haiti, Bolivia, and Guyana in the America’s. It is interesting to see that Iceland, being a highly developed European nation, does not have one either.

Note: We found this interesting map on the web, but we were unable to find its original source to give it proper credit and link to it as the source for this blog post.

Unplanned Pregnancy By State Across the United States

Nearly half of the total 6.7 million of pregnancies taken place in the United States every year are unintended pregnancies. Although the unintended pregnancy rate has remained relatively constant in the last three decades, the rate among poor women has seen a dramatic increase, especially in the South, and in cities with a large population.

Public funds are used to cover the huge cost of such unintended pregnancies. Avoiding unintended pregnancies though the funding of public family planning centers constitutes a better use of those funds. In 2008, $1.9 billion were destined to fund public family planning centers across the U.S., which resulted in savings of $7 billion, resources that would have been used to cover for the unintended pregnancies otherwise.

Source: The Huffington Post: The Geography Of Unintended Pregnancy (INFOGRAPHIC)

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