The Hermitage 3.0 (Beta)

Egads, so much good material this week. All of the videos are worth watching (not all could be embedded, sorry!) and the photo galleries are beautiful and fascinating. Obama’s Nobel Speech is worth a read. Definitely try to make some time to watch the Frontline expose on the credit card industry and the Global income vs Health vs Time videos. Or at least have them playing in the corner of your screen while you do your other web browsing =b.

(Update: Oh, and if you’re up late tonight (sunday) and lucky enough for it to be clear out, catch the geminid meteor showers!)

Data Visualization

• Unemployment in the USA timelapse
  
  A quick note – the video is scary, but also a touch misleading… every gradation is 1%, EXCEPT for PURPLE, which is 7.0-9.9%. On the other hand, 7.0% is still pretty high. For reference, the rate in Nov 2007 was ~5.0%
• Global Income vs Health vs Time. (video – 20min): Just an amazing example of the power of data visualization.
• Evolution of food portions

Environment

• Big Business and Environmentalism by David Diamond (author of Guns Germs and Steel)
• Economic Impacts of the Canadian Tar/Oil Sands (Video) (article)
  

  Refining tar sands requires two to three times as much energy as refining crude oil. The companies exploiting them burn enough natural gas to heat six million homes. Alberta’s tar sands operation is the world’s biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions. By 2020, if the current growth continues, it will produce more greenhouse gases than Ireland or Denmark. Already, thanks in part to the tar mining, Canadians have almost the highest per capita emissions on earth, and the stripping of Alberta has scarcely begun.

   

Business / Finance

• The (Credit) Card Game: Industry Expose (Website) (Full Program – 1 hr) (PBS)
  
• Blog Discussion on Credit Cards (Salmon).
  

  “The industry is just a giant wealth transfer mechanism from poor people to wealthly people. The profits from below (subprime) serve to subsidize the interest rate and rewards cost of people in the ’super prime’ category.”

• hmmm…maybe the economy won’t be better by the time I graduate…
  

  My back of the envelope calculation says that we need to add around 18 million jobs over the next five years, or 300,000 jobs a month. This puts last week’s employment report, which showed job losses of “only” 11,000 in November, in perspective. ~Krugman

• Financial Regulation (and Why we need it) (Johnson) (Stiglitz)
• Economic Impacts of Illegal Immigration (full paper)
  

  If we exclude these immigrants from the calculus, however (as domestic policymakers are naturally inclined to do), the small net gain that remains after subtracting US workers’ losses from US employers’ gains is tiny. And if we account for the small fiscal burden that unauthorized immigrants impose, the overall economic benefit is close enough to zero to be essentially a wash.

  Where does this leave policymakers?

• US Gov’t Spending 2009.
  

  US Budget

Healthcare

• Cutting Healthcare Costs: Lesson’s from agriculture. (Gawande)

Politics

• Love him or hate him, at the very least, you can’t deny that Obama has a brain: The Afghanistan Surge Deliberations (NYT) (WaPo)
• Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech
• Now presenting, your Illinois Senate Candidates
• A dysfunctional legislature helps no one. (Klein) (Speech by S. Hoyer, D-MD)
  

  the minority party has a continual stake in Congress not really working … it’s bad for Congress and bad for democracy. It means power devolves from the legislature and towards unelected, unaccountable organizations like the Federal Reserve, the EPA … or the courts.

• Iran Simulation Game
• Why are there so many military contractors? (Outside the Beltway)
  

  In 1992 the end strengths of our military forces were:
  Army 610,450
  Navy 541,883
  Marines 184,529
  Air Force 470,315

  In 2000 the end strengths of our military forces were:
  Army 481,669
  Navy 373,692
  Marines 173,371
  Air Force 354,321

Christianity

• Took a while but heartening nonetheless. Pastor Rick Warren speaks against proposed Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality law. (video) (statement – pdf)
  

  Our Christian faith recognizes violence, harassment and unjust treatment of any human being as a betrayal of Jesus’ commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. As followers of the teachings of Christ, we must express profound dismay at a bill currently before the Parliament in Uganda. The “Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2009″ would enforce lifetime prison sentences and in some cases the death penalty for homosexual behavior, as well as punish citizens for not reporting their gay and lesbian neighbors to the authorities.

Photos

• Ethnic Groups of China
• Pollution in China (Photos)
• Winter Olympic torch relay (Photos)
• Tribes of Ethiopia (Photos)
• Portraits of UN Leaders (Photos + Audio)

Funny

• Best Frequent Flier Miles scheme EVAR