I was first exposed to Dr. Rosling through TED. His ability to communicate trends in statistics is (in my experience) unparralled. This video is from Gapminder.Org and is via NPR’s Planet Money (both sites of which I cannot recommend enough). Enjoy!
For those of you who don’t want to watch Dr. Rosling narrate history as if it were a horse race, click through this graphic to get to a PDF of present day….
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
- George Santayana, philosopher, poet, critic
I’m convinced that the recently released “Torture Memos” need careful reading.
I’ll be royal here for a moment.
“We” need to develop the skills to see through the veneer of rhetoric and “we” need to develop these skills now.
“We” need to take advantage of these relatively placid times in which we currently live to learn how atrocities can “spun” with labels such as “patriotism” and “national defense.”
“We” need to learn what spin looks like so that “we” are able to act with greater competence and vigor next time (and there will be a next time) someone in authority wants to throw human rights under the bus in favor of the “expedience” of the moment.
Find the Memos here (warning — 10MB PDF file) and…I implore you to do the patriotic thing on this so-called “Patriot’s Day”….learn.
For weeks now (or so it seems) the NYTimes has been showing me a box in the right hand side of the screen marked “News for Legal Professionals.”
My reaction to this box when I first saw it was “how annoying”…folks that are not in the legal industry don’t need a box for legal professionals. It’s actually funny how I forgot that I was a legal professional until just now. In fact, I have clicked on stories in this box at least twice (each time thinking, how annoying this must be for “normal” folks). It took me until just now to click on the “What’s this” link in the top right corner and it all came rushing in.
I am a member of LinkedIn (and I suspect that I have a “keep me logged in” cookie active). I am also logged into NYTimes (which makes emailing stories so much easier). Those two companies have obviously identified me as someone they share in common…and voila…they have shared information with each other to provide me with suggested stories.
Now, I am not opposed to folks like Amazon watching what I do and then offering me suggestions based on what I have done in the past (clicks and purchases) as compared with other Amazon shoppers like me.
This is the first time that I have noticed two companies sharing data about me.
In a small way, it is a bit creepy. In a different way, I am clearly appreciative — after all, I have clicked on stories in that box (which means that I have found them relevant).
Now that I am noticing what’s going on, we’ll see how I react over time.
More from me on this later.
If you haven’t been to mint.com, you are really missing a bunch of great free stuff. The following Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis is theirs and, well it’s the best thing that I have seen so far. If you have thoughts about this chart, make sure you leave them at their site…the discussion there is pretty intense.
Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis
j² |j skwər-ed| n. 1. A forty- something amateur (one lacking the skill of a professional) parent of two beautiful girls (all bias acknowledged). 2. A husband of nearly ten years. 3. A partner in the Silicon Valley Office of a Boston Law Firm. 4. A home winemaker. 5. A part-time blogger. Email me.
