The Volume of Facts – Separating the “Signal” from the “Noise” – U.S. Ranking in International Corruption Perception Index

By September 3rd, 2013

Keep Christmas Simple !!! 

Order a Copy of The Relevance of Reason – Business and Politics Today

To Give to Your Friends and Family Today

AVAILABILITY OF MACK W. BORGEN’S BOOK

THE RELEVANCE OF REASON 

– The Hard Facts and Real Data About the State of Current America  – Business and Politics –

(Brody and Schmitt Publishers, an Imprint of Summerland Publishing)(2013)

 The Relevance of Reason – Business and Politics is the first book in Mack W. Borgen’s seven-book The Chance of a Lifetime series. You are invited to get a copy of The Relevance of Reason – Business and Politics by just clicking Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com. You may also order it directly from my publisher’s website at SummerlandPublishing.com. 

Please also kindly remember to ask for The Relevance of Reason – Business and Politics at your local bookstore, and post/reference/like The Relevance of Reason on your social media accounts. THANK YOU SO MUCH.

Excerpt of the Day

The Volume of Facts – Separating the “Signal” from the Noise”

          The sheer volume of facts and our ready google-wikipedia access to them encourages people to collect their own facts and adopt and repeat their favorite facts of convenience. In our newly discovered age of scarcity, austerity, and eco0nomy, facts are almost unique if for no other reason than there are so many of them …. The sheer volume of data makes it hard to separate the important and useful data from the irrelevant or misleading data. In the wonderful parlance of Nate Silver, it is hard to separate the “signal” from the “noise.” As he noted in a recent interview, “(e)very day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent amount of data that the Library of Congress has in its entire collection …. But most of it is cat videos on YouTube or 13-year0olds exchanging text mewssages about the next Twilight movie.”

Adapted and excerpted from Borgen, M., The Relevance of Reason – Business and Politics (2013), p. 5, citing Silver, N., The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail –But Some Don’t,” and Heilpern, J., “Silver Streak,” Vanity Fair, November, 2012, p. 70. All Rights Reserved.

Fact of the Day

U.S. Ranks 24th in International Corruption Perceptions Index

       The International Corruption Perceptions Index was developed by Transparency International and “reflects the views of observers from around the world, including experts living and working in the countries/territories evaluated.” The concept of perceptions is used because corruption normally involves illegal and concealed activities which only surface in the context of scandals, investigations, and prosecutions. Thus, the most reliable method of “compiling comparable country data is to capture perceptions of those in a position to offer assessments of public sector corruption in a given country.” Excerpts from the 2011 ranking of 176 countries evaluated are as follows:

International Corruption Perceptions Index

(Least Public Corruption Index Score is 10.0)

Ranking     Country    Corruption Perceptions Index Score        Ranking   Country    Corruption Perceptions Index Score

1 .           New Zealand                               9.5                                             22.         Chile                                              7.2

2.            Denmark                                     9.4                                             23.          Qatar                                            7.2

2.           Finland                                         9.4                                            24.         United States                        7.1

4.           Sweden                                        9.3                                             25.          France/St. Lucia/Uruguay      7.0

5.            Singapore                                   9.2

6. – 21.    ………………

Borgen, M., The Relevance of Reason –  Business and Politics (2013), p. 231. See also Boston, W., Pangolos, P., The Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2012, confirming that the initial 2012 data appears to be very similar to the above 2011 listings, but with the U.S. improving from 24th in 2011 to 19th in 2012 — just behind Japan and U.K.  Note: The highest International Corruption Perceptions Index 2011 score for a country in the Americas was Canada with a score of 8.7. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 3rd, 2013 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Latest News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.