Why are Palestinians Killed by Israeli Defense Forces?

I watched 5 Broken Cameras and was surprised that Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) shot live ammunition at Palestinians protesting the security wall. One Palestinian Protester in the documentary was shot dead. I wanted to know how often protestors throwing stones were killed by the IDF. 

B'tselem has statistics for each fatality caused by IDF in both West Bank and Gaza Strip since 9/2000, with a short description of the event that took place. Some examples of these descriptions are show below:

2                          Killed while on his way to buy candy at a store next to her school.

3                                   Killed when Border Police came to his house to arrest him.

4                                                                         Killed in his house.

5                Killed during the arrest of his brother, who Wanted by Israel. Was not armed.

6  Wanted by Israel. Killed during an exchange of gunfire with soldiers who came to arrest him.

I'd like to classify these descriptions to see reasons people are killed by IDF. Doing so can give a better picture of the current conflict and problems to overcome.

First some descriptive Statistics:

6711 Total Observations - All considered Palestinian Citizens

517 Female and 6194 Males

Mean age is 25.38 years, with 19-29 1st-3rd quartile. 

Above is an Age Pyramid of Palestinians killed. Men are predominately the victims and have a slightly right skewed distribution with age. Women have a much more uniform distribution. 

Overall the demographics most likely to be killed by IDF forces are male and in their mid twenties.

Below is a time series plot of all Palestinians Killed monthly by Gaza or West Bank Location. 

Palestinians Killed in IDF confrontations Map

However, 539 deaths had no description.Below are those without time series:

Missing data appears to occur with high number of deaths. 

To classify the data I used Latent Dirichlet Allocation. This method assumes each text description or post is an amalgamation of independent topics. Each topic has a probability distribution over the set of words in all posts. For each description the algorithm takes the words as given and produces a probability distribution over the set of topics. In effect, each post will result in a combination of "Topics" and will be a sum of different these Topics. The benefit of LDA is that multiple topics can be applied to each description. 

Topics are displayed below in decreasing Importance:

Topic 7	Topic 9	Topic 4	Topic 14	Topic 5	Topic 12	Topic 19	Topic 1	Topic 15	Topic 18
polic	famili	gunfir	idf	fire	arm	want	gaza	oper	car
station	hous	exchang	incurs	rocket	men	israel	near	defens	ride
build	bomb	soldier	camp	street	area	arrest	fenc	day	anoth
near	member	kissufim	refuge	next	move	person	citi	shield	also
next	armi	attempt	rafah	school	walk	undercov	perimet	repent	drive
injur	tunnel	guard	jenin	mortar	present	unit	cross	rain	travel
council	warn	apart	albureij	qassam	asabra	came	strip	summer	road
legisl	use	farmland	provis	earlier	demonstr	action	northern	idf	man
abu	nine	nablus	yavn	hit	east	hide	east	katif	taxi
offic	refus	organ	build	jabalya	observ	attempt	approach	aim	two
Topic 8	Topic 16	Topic 10	Topic 11	Topic 20	Topic 6	Topic 2	Topic 17	Topic 13	Topic 3
way	idf	home	soldier	hous	tri	friend	person	palestinian	wound
attack	neighborhood	neighborhood	shot	stand	near	work	armi	forc	two
settlement	incurs	isra	stone	roof	border	home	bomb	secur	brother
tri	azaytun	beit	demonstr	entranc	explos	meter	hama	three	die
checkpoint	yuni	struck	throw	neighbor	assassin "area"	militari	along	later
carri	khan	shell	open	found	plant	sit	wing	incid	father
post	azeitun	missil	head	bodi	group	yard	mosqu	headquart	hospit
infiltr	locat	civilian	jeep	went	tank	land	store	four	peopl
soldier	pass	kill	part	mother	charg	two	islam	villag	injur
follow	check	hanun	petrol	son	place	agricultur	jihad	five	sister

Two Topics I thought were worth mentioning were topics 11 and 19.

Topic 11 includes terms "Wanted", "Arrest" "Israel", "Person", "Undercover". This topic discusses Palestinians killed by IDF soldiers who were wanted by Israel. 

Above is the average proportion of each post attributed to this topic. One can see that it increased in 2006 in West Bank, while remaining relatively constant in Gaza. Because Israel has much more control of WB than Gaza Strip, it makes sense that Israel tries and arrest more people in WB and results in more deaths as a result.

Topic 11 discusses those who died during demonstrations; the very topic that brought my interset tot he topic. Its interesting that there has been a steady increase in West Bank while Gaza has seen a slight decrease in these. The Separation Barrier could be the reason for this divergence in protesting.


R Code

Data

Israeli Immigration and Demographics

Israeli Jewish population has been increasing steadily since Independence. Number of Jews in world has remained fairly constant and increasing at a slow rate after WW2.

Jewish Israelis emigrated in distinct waves throughout post war period. First mast influx occurred in 1948-1951 when most of Middle East Jews (Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Yemen, etc) and Eastern European Jews came (mainly Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria).

Between 1952 - 1971 most migration was from North African (Morocco and Algeria) and Eastern Europe. The only large movement of Jews from Middle East into Israel was from Egypt (I'm assuming 1956 Suez War was the cause). Itzik informed me his family move from Iraq in 1952 which was after most Jewish Iraqi's left.

The 1980's were a lull of immigration, with Ethiopian Jews beginning to come.

Finally, at the end of Cold War Former USSR (mainly Russia and Ukraine) countries allowed Jew's to emigrate to Israel. This ongoing migration contained over 1 million Jews and the dramatic increase in Israeli Population is shown below.

Above is population in thousands of Israel by Religion. We can clearly see the large increase in Jewish population occurring in late 1980's early 1990's from former USSR immigratns. Also, one can see a sudden increase in Muslim population in 1967 due to the annexation of East Jerusalem.

To get a better understanding of growth rates in Israel Log population values of the same data are shown below.

Here we can see more clearly that Muslim Population is increasing at a much faster rate than Jews or any other group.

Also note that in 1981 number of Druze went up suddenly because Israel (all but in name) annexed the Golan Heights. I'm not sure why the Christian population increased in mid 1990's and decreased...

 Above is Population based on Ethnicity and not Religion as before. It looks much the same except the Christian and Muslim population are shown as Arabs.

Finally, I'd like to close off by including West Bank and Gaza Population. These territories include over 4 million people. If we include them in our current data then Jews are only slightly in the majority.

Market Cap and Ownership Structure of Auto Companies

Automotive companies are generally compared by the number of cars sold. For example; Toyota and GM are often in competition to sell the most number of cars in a year. While interesting, these seem kind of irrelevant. For instance; if one sells many cars but makes no money on them, they won't be in business for long. 

I think a more interesting indicator is market capitalization. This is basically the value of the company on the open market and is based on the beliefs of future earnings. Below is the value of each company as of September 2 2013.

Toyota is number one by a large margin and blows GM out of the water in terms of value. The second most valuable company, VW at $108 Billion dollars, is just over half of Toyota's $208 billion. 

Fiat, which currently owns over half of Chrysler (Chrysler isn't showed because it's owned by UAW and Fiat with no shares on market to price it), and is worth less then Tesla a new company that sells relatively few cars. 

These market values are not independent in the sense that some companies own parts of other companies. Below is a network graph with percentage of ownership along the edges with size of vertex proportional to market cap. An arrow pointing to a company from another indicates that company is partly owned  (for example A <- B means B owns part of A). 

Two things to note about the ownership graph:
1. It's easier to see how VW and Toyota both own part of Suzuki with this graph. Of course since Toyota owns Suzuki through its holding in Subaru so it's holding is minuscule.

2. There is cool menage a trois between Nissan, Renault, and Mercedes, where all have ownership in another.

Mr. Al-Sabah Welcomes you to the Middle East

A very brief Letter to the Editor to the Financial Times discusses the relations among the Middle East succintly and accurately. Quoted in full:

"Sir, Iran is backing Assad. Gulf states are against Assad!

Assad is against Muslim Brotherhood. Muslim Brotherhood and Obama are against General Sisi.

But Gulf states are pro Sisi! Which means they are against Muslim Brotherhood!

Iran is pro Hamas, but Hamas is backing Muslim Brotherhood!

Obama is backing Muslim Brotherhood, yet Hamas is against the US!

Gulf states are pro US. But Turkey is with Gulf states against Assad; yet Turkey is pro Muslim Brotherhood against General Sisi. And General Sisi is being backed by the Gulf states!

Welcome to the Middle East and have a nice day."

These relations are quite difficult to comprehend all together, so I made a graph to try and clarify the relationships.

Yup, looks like the Middle East is a cluster****!

R Code

Data

Car Magazine Hot Hatch Hall of Fame Graphs

Car Magazine's June 2013 issue picked 17 of the "greatest hot hatches of all time" and included specs. Unfortanely they didn't include any graphs of numbers to see how hot hatches developed through time, so I took it upon myself as a civic duty (my way of giving back to the community) to display the numbers in graphs. I also included weight for each car (in lbs of course) and UK CPI index to find the real value of prices of cars sold when new.

Steady decline in 0-60 times throughout the years. The Peugoet 106 Rallye had the slowest time of all at 10.3 seconds and was sold between 1994 - 1998.  I've seen reported times for the Pug at 8.3 seconds so this might be a typo, then again it only has 100 bhp so its not going to be a speed demon...

Interestingly, some of the quickest hot hatches were sold in the late 1980's and early 1990's. These included the Lancia Delta Integrale (5.7 sec), Ford Escort Cosworth (6.2 sec), and Nissan Sunny GTI-R (6.1 sec). A plausible reason for the quickness of these cars was that all had AWD and therefore had more traction off the line to accelerate quickly.

 Above graph is Real Price when the car was new in 2009 Pounds. The real price of the Delta Integrale, Sunny GTI-R, and Ford Escort Cosworth are all relatively more expensive in real terms. However, the high cost of those cars was probably because of the very high performance for their time (and today's time, look at 0-60 mph).

Very generally cars go through life stages. When new they look bold and modern. When slightly old (5-10 years) they look dated and their faults are well known. But something interesting happens to cars after about 10 years: they start to look cool again and they are appreciated more. I wanted to see if this U-shaped "lifecycle" is present in the price data. To compare cars and their particular life cycle stage I divided the Real cost when new by the current cost today and plotted those values against time. The resulting figure is shown above. In some sense the U is there: a cars value relative to its initial real price declines for the first 10-15 years and then increases again. 

Looking at this graph, I'm thinking maybe I should buy a Puegeot 306 GTi-6. After all even now its performance are up to par with modern cars. In addition, its at the trough of the coolness curve so it might appreciate in value.

 Above two graphs show the what RPM the maximum horsepower and maximum torque occurs at for each car. The color is categorized by whether the car is turbocharged or not. Both graphs show that naturally aspirated cars increase RPM through time while turbocharged engines reduce RPM.

I'm kind of puzzled by this. Obviously to get more HP out of a naturally aspirated engine one needs to increase the rev range and should work in principle for Turbos. However, turbocharged engines seem to be taking a different route and are able to get the performance that surpasses that of a naturally aspirated engine but at a much (and continuously lower) rev band.

 Most engines are at 2 liters and doesn't appear to be a strong trend.

 Maximum Speed shows a strong trend by time.

Data and R Code:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9nc4zDDl2T-S211amdzVkpoUk0/edit?usp=sharing

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9nc4zDDl2T-eE54aV9GYkhlclU/edit?usp=sharing