Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Overview of responses Background Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has an even grander vision for what the web can be. He and his allies have been working through the World Wide Web Consortium on an evolving initiative they call the semantic web. Berners-Lee and co-authors wrote in Scientific American in […]
An analysis of the two main ways in which religion is restricted – by government actions and by hostilities in society – reveals a number of patterns. Some are evident in a chart that compares these two measures for the 50 most populous countries as well as for the six countries with smaller populations that […]
This table shows all 198 countries and territories in descending order of their scores on the Pew Forum’s index of social hostilities involving religion. The Pew Forum has not attached numerical rankings to the countries because there are numerous tie scores and the differences between the scores of countries that are close to each other […]
This table shows all 198 countries and territories in descending order of their scores on the Pew Forum’s index of government restrictions on religion. The Pew Forum has not attached numerical rankings to the countries because there are numerous tie scores and the differences between the scores of countries that are close to each other […]
The future of books Respondents were asked to explain their choice and “share your view of the Internet’s influence on the future of knowledge-sharing in 2020, specifically when it comes to reading and writing and other displays of information – what is likely to stay the same and what will be different? What do you […]
Views of the Islamic extremist groups Hamas and Hezbollah are, with few exceptions, largely negative. In fact, a majority in only one country – Jordan – holds a favorable opinion of both the militant Palestinian Islamic organization Hamas and Shia Islamic group Hezbollah based in Lebanon. Certainly, many Palestinians and Egyptians also embrace Hamas and […]
The Government Restrictions Index is based on 20 questions used by the Pew Forum to assess whether governments – including at the local or provincial level – restrict religious practices or beliefs. The questions are intended to gauge the extent to which governments try to control religious groups or individuals, prohibit conversions from one faith […]
America’s ratings have risen north of the border, but differences persist over Afghanistan and U.S. economic influence
The future of intelligence Eminent tech scholar and analyst Nicholas Carr wrote a provocative cover story for the Atlantic Monthly magazine in the summer of 2008[1. Note: Previously, this sentence had incorrectly stated that the article was published in the summer of 2009.] with the cover line: “Is Google Making us Stupid?” He argued that […]