Nouriel Roubini on TDS


Poor Nouriel… nobody ever listens

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Making the Oil Spill Real – 4 visual aids

Almost a month ago I posted a link to this site that lets you view the oil spill as if it were on top of your home town. I think this is a great way to get a sense of how it actually is and what an impact it might have. Today I found some more links that might help you get a grasp of what’s really happening out there.



boston.com

Spilling 25,000 barrels of oil in Unreal 3 Engine


virtualrealityblog via discovery

This ginormous barrel tower is made up of only 25,000 barrels, less than half of the estimated 60,000 barrels spewing out EVERY DAY (source) It probably would not be possible for the game engine to even handle the amount of barrels that have come out since the beginning of the spill. If he tried to load them all, the guy’s computer would run out of memory, overheat the graphics card, freeze, bsod, . . . (you get the idea, the numbers are just too big).

The Oil Spill Viewed From Space

oil spill from space

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Can’t Wait to use Pivot to Explore My Data

Thought about this a lot but never saw any dataviz program like this before. Hans Rosling’s program was very informative, but based on relatively simple government data. Pivot is made to draw from much larger sets; it’s designed for making sense of the modern internet.

I like how Pivot will let me view information the way I want to view it – start off by viewing everything all at once, then drilling down in more detail after taking a look at trends and common qualities of large bins of data.

There’s so many things I want to use this for… I hope I can be diligent in my studies and eventually be a good enough programmer to develop something that will take advantage of Pivot’s capabilities. Even if I never get there, somebody out there is definitely going to be able to make an amazing tool out of this, I’ll just use theirs once they release it.

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Data sharing with Copenhagen Wheel

http://senseable.mit.edu/copenhagenwheel/

Seems like most people would buy the wheel just to propel their bike, and unknowingly upload their gathered data at the end of the day.

Practically everything on the internet is already being datamined, seems like it’s going to extend into real life pretty soon. I wonder what kind of other data gathering devices will become available…

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Maybe it’s not so bad here: Outsourcing Unemployment to China

Although I don’t keep up to date on Asian news, I hope to live/work in Asia at some point in my life, so I’m interested in taking look into what’s going on over there every once in a while. Seeing this video really helped me to appreciate how good we have it over here.

Adam Yamaguchi travels to China to look at how we’ve outsourced our unemployment.
Length: 25:05
Content: Video tour of unemployment in China. Factory workers are laid off with no notice from employers and have to return to their families in the countryside when they can’t find work.
via Mish

The last time I went to China was two years ago, and I exchanged $1 for 8 RMB. If I were to go now I would only get 6.8 RMB.

I remember buying a 40 oz beer on the street from a little girl’s kiosk for only 3rmb ~25 cents, but in a bar a few miles away the beer would be 40rmb for a bottle 1/3 the size! No wonder the bar was so empty…

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