Anglo-American attitudes

The Economist has a recent article titled “Anglo-Saxon attitudes” about the past and future of UK-US and UK-EU relationships. In part, the article looks at the assumption, as Mark Twain would have it, that “[w]e have always been kin”. Most interesting to me are the results of the survey. I clipped some I thought were particularly notable below.

The poll results seem to illustrate the notion that European conservatives are generally more socially liberal than American Democrats.

foreign affairs &politics posted by: dan  @  02 Apr 2008 3:11 | Comments (0)

links

Love and the Internets – A comic titled “Fixed Width” on xkcd. One of many cute drawings.

“Welcome to Palestine” – This article by Robert Fisk is about both about the coup in Gaza and Middle East politics in general. The author is a 25-year resident of Beirut and widely respected Middle East reporter. This view is mainstream among Europeans, so it is remarkable that such a reasonable argument is almost never put forward in the US popular media.
We Feel Fine – This site is hard to categorize. Part blog aggregator, part internet visualization, part peep-hole.
Top Ten Chinese Thinkers – A tongue-in-cheek review of Chinese thinkers on the blog of a dead warlord plotting his future revolution.
Tagged: links

foreign affairs &links posted by: dan  @  16 Jun 2007 15:52 | Comments (0)

links

Last word in Shakespeare -
Lay on, Macduff,
And damn’d be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’”

A schematic of the internet – I think this a great picture with more than a passing resemblance to biological neural networks.

Histopathology images – part of attending medical lectures every week is getting to see some amazing images. Often they are disturbing, very few are as beautiful as this.

links posted by: dan  @  20 Apr 2007 12:23 | Comments (0)

links

Kind of following up the previous post about pretty graphs, it is being reported that Google is buying the technology behind Trendalyzer. My brother first sent me their link last year with a sentence about it being the best website ever.

Gapminder is the organization behind the tool. Their Human Development Trends, 2005 presentation for the UNDP is a great example of a compelling online presentation. I’d like to hear the lecture that went with it.

On a different topic, I enjoyed Tyler Cowen’s post about our next President. He picks Guiliani, and his reasoning seems sound.

development &foreign affairs &politics &technology posted by: dan  @  18 Mar 2007 20:26 | Comments (0)

Visualizations

Many Eyes is a site by the Collaborative User Experience group at IBM Research. They are hosting visualizations of user submitted data and allowing the online community to comment. I read about it first on another cool site, Read/Write Web.

There are many different topics and datasets. Certainly some seem more reliable than others. The Proto-/Indo-European Language Tree visualization seems to imply less relation between Danish and Swedish than British English and New World English. I think they should recheck their calculations. Snoop Dogg and Queen Elizabeth are not speaking the same language, citizens of Göteberg and Køpenhavn pretty much are.

Lots to look at there, here are a few I liked:

On a Mac, I had to use Safari to get the site to work.

For more graphing smiles: graphs of the not so obvious

technology posted by: dan  @  12 Mar 2007 22:57 | Comments (0)