Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2011 October 11

= October 11 =

Bells tolling canonical hours
In Naples of the sixteenth century, how many bell tolls signalled each of the 8 canonical hours, and was there an introductory flourish before the number was struck?211.28.63.151 (talk) 04:51, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

Lingering (US) financial impact from the Bank Bail out
I've checked out the relevent articles and while I've learned that some banks have paid back their bail out funds, exactly what is the direct financial impact to our country from this. If we made a profit in general, would it be reasonable to talk about the (strictly financial) cost of the bailout as if it was a downside? 148.134.37.3 (talk) 16:06, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
 * The data you do find will likely be a direct result of the political party which is sponsoring the data; those that support the party which sponsored the bailout will produce data to say it was a raging success, and those that support the party which opposed the bailout will produce data to say it was an abject failure. Don't take any greater meaning from this other than you can predict the politics of the person publishing the numbers merely by what the numbers they publish are.  -- Jayron  32  17:16, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
 * The bailout of the traditional banks is probably a wash for the government. A bigger and continuing liability to the government has been the bailout of nonbanks such as the American International Group, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, which left the government holding a large amount of questionable debt (i.e., debt that may never be repaid) and left the government with an almost exclusive responsibility for mortgage finance and a growing exposure to risky mortgage debt. Marco polo (talk) 19:40, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Should we even attempt to observe that there were time cost advantages to the private capital bailed out, that can never be recooped from private investors by the commonweal? Fifelfoo (talk) 11:07, 12 October 2011 (UTC)
 * What does that mean exactly? If you mean time value of money then we typically call that an interest rate and that's certainly reflected in the bailouts. And as per Marco's point....I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone call the whole endevour of the past 3 years a wash. It's not like the government's participating in the housing market as a naive investor. The U.S. government for at least 60 years had been intimately involved in the mortgage market, in fact if you consider mortgage in its legal sense this predates the railroad based land sales... but digressing the government's very much a player in this market. Shadowjams (talk) 11:12, 12 October 2011 (UTC)
 * What does it mean? No lender was willing to lend at any interest rate to failed banks—the government stepping in and acting as a lender of last resort is a transparent example of corporate welfare, of state capitalism, on a massive scale.  You observe that this has always been the case with the market in land, which is kind of my point.  Asking if private capital has adequately recompensed the commonweal is a ridiculous thing to ask, since the primary function of government in the settler societies has been to alienate common land (unequal treaties, genocide, displacement, side effects of disease, warfare, your pick), and then to gift it to private capital.  No interest rate can represent the externality of the invidious displacement of traditional owners, nor could an interest rate in 1850 ever represent the expected benefits of improvement to a private landowner.  Seeking to redress a policy decision which lies at the heart of the way settler society capitalism with a market mechanism is trying to avoid the central point: that the government, supposedly acting in the common interest, has a marked propensity to give social property to the rich.  One can be in favour of it, or oppose it; but, attempting to avoid the matter by thinking that banks can ever "pay back" what amounts to free money (the difference between the market interest rate of infinity versus any finite interest rate) is ridiculous. Fifelfoo (talk) 00:33, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

human generation length
How long is the average human generation and how much does it differ in various locations around the world, from State to State, race to race, occupation to occupation, income to income, family size to family size? --DeeperQA (talk) 16:40, 11 October 2011 (UTC)


 * A "generation" is not a unit of measurement. Perhaps you want to know what average age that women have their first birth, which can be seen as a number of years between mothers and children on average. -- k a i n a w &trade; 16:53, 11 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Googling "Mother's age at first birth": here returns promissing results, here is a good breakdown by U.S. State as one link I got from there. Some "generations" are defined by a shared culture, in the U.S. at least there are groups known as the Silent Generation (born roughly 1925-1945), the Baby boomers (born roughly 1946-1964), Generation X (born roughly 1965-1980 or so), Generation Y (born roughly 1981-late 1990s), Generation Z (born late 1990s - today).  These definitions are very fuzzy around the edges (i.e. there may not be a significant cultural difference between someone born in 1945 or someone born in 1946, despite being nominally from different defined generations); and these cultural definitions seem to run VERY roughly about 15-18 years.  But don't look for these ill-defined, fuzzy groups to be useful to extract a lot of meaning as far as the "average length of a generation"; these are mainly used by historians to define certain historical "eras" and cultures, rather than to define fertility data.  -- Jayron  32  17:12, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Generation length is not a statistic usually collected by demographers. Average age of mothers at birth may be collected, but it doesn't directly measure the duration of generations, since it may not be the same as the average age of fathers at birth. These statistics are generally not collected for all of the variables that you mention.  In most historical societies, the average age of fathers has been higher than that of mothers.  An average of these two numbers (weighted slightly according to the sex ratio) would yield the average duration of generations.  That number has varied historically depending on economic and cultural factors.  For example, in societies in which there is a financial hurdle to marriage (e.g., a requirement that a man had to have his own house and be able to support a family before marrying), the average duration of generations tends to be longer.  In much of the world today, the duration of generations is longer than it was before the mid-20th century because of parents' desire to assure a high standard of living for their offspring, which may involve saving for a home purchase, saving for a wedding, paying professional dues before achieving an income that would support a family, and so on.  Also, as women have gained better access to education, they tend to postpone childbearing until they have completed their education and perhaps embarked on a career.  See Demographic transition.  Marco polo (talk) 20:05, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
 * We do actually have an article that is relevant to some of the OP's questions, see Generation, which states that Some define a familial generation as the average time between a mother's first offspring and her daughter's first offspring. (unsourced), and a little further down in the section:
 * In developed nations the average familial generation length is in the high 20s and has even reached 30 years in some nations.(Ref: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Social Policy Division SF2.3: Mean age of mothers at first childbirth) As of 2008, the average generation length in the United States was 25 years, up 3.6 years since 1970 (Ref: Mathews TJ, Hamilton BE. Delayed childbearing: More women are having their first child later in life. NCHS data brief, no 21. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. 2009). Germany saw the largest increase in generation length over that time period, from 24 years in 1970 to 30 years in 2008. Conversely, generation length has changed little and remains in the low 20s in less developed nations. --NorwegianBluetalk 20:16, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
 * And "real" generations get all confusing. While the "X", "Y" and "Millenials" are based on year, there is also the generations within families, and they don't all line up very well.  For example, my grandparents were born the same decade as my wife's parents, but because her mom was so old when my wife was born, she is in my generation (X), even though she was born to the same generation as my parents (boomers).  Mingmingla (talk) 03:15, 12 October 2011 (UTC)
 * The question as posed focusses on generation in the present and recent past, and I think the responses are downplaying the significance or the accuracy of such numbers. (The number do vary, so extreme accuracy is not to be expected.) But I think over the long term—involving tens of thousands of years—generation is an important unit of time, as it would seem to relate to the possibility for evolutionary change in human beings. Bus stop (talk) 03:39, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

A simple backwards calculation from the usage of most contemporary authors provides an age of 20 years per generation. Most native speakers of English I have encountered (Will Durant) will testify to the same span. I personally have never read an author such as Jeremy Wade who means to indicate more than 25 years at most for a generation. The fuzziness of the concept should be evident, but its ordinal relation to 20 years should be indubitable. μηδείς (talk) 04:11, 12 October 2011 (UTC)
 * There's not much magical about a fixed 20-year unit for a generation. "Age of mother at first childbirth" seems like a rather useful nugget of socio-demographic data, but there's nothing particularly magical about the "20-year generation" excepting as a loose historical definition of eras, and even then it isn't restricted to 20-year windows on the dot; but a loose definition of people likely to share common values and history based on when they were born.  It's a useful concept, but not extended too far.  When attempting to gather hard data on the "length of a generation", the OP seems to be asking on the numerical timeperiod between someone's birth and someone's having children of their own; and how this varies over time, space, and economics.  In that case, the relevent data is "mother's age at childbirth" or "parent's age at childbirth" or other similar data.  The historical "generation" eras (Boomers, Gen-X, etc.) are useful for entirely different purposes.  -- Jayron  32  04:31, 12 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, if he wants hard data let him say so. But even by the nominal "data" of so-called generations like "X" we seem to be looking at 20-year periods.  For God's sake, do let the man speak up. μηδείς (talk) 04:55, 12 October 2011 (UTC)


 * 20 to 25 years is a pretty good guesstimate. Many things can affect the specifics. As Jayron notes, the conventional wisdom "generations" are more like short-term "eras". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 14:24, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

Iran murder plot 2011 on the Saudi ambassador, why no article?
I read about the Iran murder plot on the Saudi ambassador, why is there no article on this?, there ought be lots of stuff to write about. sourceElectron9 (talk) 20:02, 11 October 2011 (UTC)


 * This is a very very very current event. Wikipedia is not a news outlet for late-breaking news. Perhaps you want WikiNews. -- k a i n a w &trade; 20:04, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
 * You could write the article yourself. 24.38.31.81 (talk) 20:46, 11 October 2011 (UTC)


 * There is some mention here Adel al-Jubeir. From the small amount I've seen, I would suggesting splitting it into a seperate article is premature. Nil Einne (talk) 21:26, 11 October 2011 (UTC)


 * This will affect the international relations, even in the long term. So at least the "Iran – United States relations" article ought to have a link. The complete vaccum seems weird. Electron9 (talk) 21:51, 11 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Actually there is already 2 articles Iranian assassination plot and Adel Al-Jubeir assassination plot. The first article has existed since 18:41, 11 October 2011‎ (UTC) i.e. before your first post while the second since 21:29, 11 October 2011‎ (UTC) i.e. before your second post. I'm not sure why you believe there's a vacuum. Nil Einne (talk) 22:55, 11 October 2011 (UTC)


 * They lack proper linking then, even google failed to find the article.Electron9 (talk) 23:28, 11 October 2011 (UTC)


 * That's a common problem and part of the reason we often get multiple articles, you can't expect articles to be perfect for something which only happened a few hours ago. The wikipedia search is definitely slow at updating and should not be used for searching something created so recently but from my experience Google updates quite fast (it definitely found both articles when I searched about the time of my second reply, I did not do so earlier as I presumed it had already been done). It doesn't mean there's a vacuum. Nil Einne (talk) 23:33, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
 * I almost created the article myself and was similarly surprised when it wasn't created when I went to look for it. That said, I also was the first to note on wiki (I think) the two duplicate articles and the OP of the first one merged them soon after. While the wiki process has its issues, it also tends to fix things pretty quickly. As far as the current name/scope of the article, that's extremely hard to get right early on. I think the most important thing for a wiki to do is focus all efforts onto one article, so the debates and disagreements can happen early and often, as opposed to being distributed across a dozen articles or subjects that people can't find til weeks later... and I think in this case that has been expertly accomplished. The name of the article may change, but at least everyone's on the same [literal] page. Shadowjams (talk) 07:06, 12 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Presuming a Google or other internet search doesn't work (and just to be clear, when I say that I mean searching for obvious terms like 'iranian assassination plot' in this case with 'site:en.wikipedia.org' not a general search and hoping it comes up in the first few results), a quick way to look for an article is probably to go to an existing article and see what links here. Most article creators do at least add wikilinks in their articles to other articles. I believe, my tests seems to confirm, this basically gets shown as soon as a wikilink is added. Obviously you need to chose a target article without thousands of wikilinks but that is likely to be wikilinked. In the case here, Adel Al-Jubeir is an obvious choice, and it was added fairly early on although admitedly a while after the article was created (although I'm not sure if Adel Al-Jubeir was identified as one of the purported targets of the plot so early on). It's probably also worth checking out Portal:Current events although this can take a while to be updated as well (in this case it did). Nil Einne (talk) 13:33, 12 October 2011 (UTC)


 * There is an essay about undue weight to recent events at Recentism. Comet Tuttle (talk) 16:49, 12 October 2011 (UTC)


 * The article mentioned above is now linked off the en main page: Adel al-Jubeir assassination plot. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:51, 12 October 2011 (UTC)