Bombs in India or Lost Bullets in Brazil?

The following blog wondered (sorry, it is in Portuguese) the other day whether the deaths by bombing in India are higher than deaths by lost bullets in Brazil. If you are not familiar with the concept, a “lost bullet” hit is a somewhat common phenomenon in some metropolitan areas, especially in the city of Rio de Janeiro. It happens when the bullet hits someone by accident, because the person was in its direction. In Rio it is common because of the violence (mostly due to drug traffic) but also given the way slums (the now infamously known “favelas”) are shaped in the city, surrounding richer neighborhoods in the nearby hills. It is not rare to see gunshot marks in the buildings nearer the favelas, for example. The stories of being hit or nearly hit are so commonplace that they don’t even appear in the news anymore.

And in fact, it turns out that probably more people die by lost bullets in Brazil than by bombing in India. According to the mentioned blog, 152 people died in India due to terrorist attack this year. On the other hand, it is estimated that 170 were hit by lost bullets in 2007, only in the city of Rio (Portuguese again sorry)! Because there is not official statistic of lost bullet, we can only guess the actual numbers for the whole country.

However, if we take into account all cases of murders, Brazil shows up as the really bad guy. In 2006, 46660 people were assassinated in the country. In contrast, 32719 is the number in India (this one is in English). It gets even worse if you divide the number by total population: Approximately 0.23 murders for every 100 people in Brazil and only 0.02 in India. Even if you double the underestimated total number of murders in India, the country will still have a much lower murder rate by inhabitants. The only good news for Brazil is that its rate is declining: It fell by 8.5% in the last 3 years (Portuguese).

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Chrome: Just a new browser?

Howdy! I’m back to some frequent updates again!

Initially, as my first post to inaugurate the return, I planned to translate a post I wrote in Portuguese about the launch of Chrome, Google’s browser. Since in English there are some much more rich information about the topic available, I decided to rather just point them out instead.

In the post I wrote in Portuguese, I start by talking about how in the current short-term scenario the release of Chrome wouldn’t matter that much. It would be much like the loss Netscape suffered in the mid-1990s against Microsoft due to the absence of network externalities and to low switching costs between browsers. You can read Shapiro and Varian's “Information Rules” book for detailed information on this or go straight to the page where the spoiler is in there. You can also check for yourself that Google’s browser so far has reached only 1% usage.

The point then is that this release has a vision attached to it. It’s not a simple release of another browser. Instead, it’s one more step towards a paradigm shift. We are probably witnessing the transition from a world dominated by PCs requiring an operating system to function to one where PCs or even operating systems won’t be required anymore. It is in that new world Google is betting.

So, for more details, I recommend:

• Nicholas Carr’s post on the topic;
• The Economist’s overview of Chrome’s launch; and
• The 5 reasons why Chrome could take over the world.