I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading my Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad X60s to Ubuntu version 10.04 (from version 9.04). A few hours into the upgrade and all is well. If you’re thinking about upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04, here are some suggestions based on my experience. Before you start, though, be prepared for a process that will take […]
The Wikipedia article on “redlining” (“the practice of denying, or increasing the cost of, services such as banking, insurance, access to jobs, access to health care, or even supermarkets to residents in certain, often racially determined, areas”) includes a great map of Philadelphia from 1936. The map, which was prepared by a New Deal created […]
The National Day Laborers Organizing Network (NDLON) received one of this year’s Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Awards. Here is NDLON Executive Director Pablo Alvarado receiving the award on behalf of his organization: Alvarado reports that the Obama administration is currently deporting about 1,100 immigrants every day.
Enik Rising ran an interesting post almost a year ago on the relationship between unemployment and midterm elections, which, with next Tuesday looming, has resurfaced again on the interwebs. The Enik Rising post presents three graphs relating outcomes in midterm elections (the number of House seats gained or lost by the party holding the presidency […]
Diane Ravitch has written an absolutely devastating review of Davis Guggenheim’s new documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman’”. The review, in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, points out a few large inaccuracies in the film. For example, only about 25 percent of U.S. eigth graders –not 70 percent, as the film asserts– […]
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a nice short analysis of the most recent IRS data (.xls file) from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. The best graph in the report shows that the inflation-adjusted income for the bottom 90 percent and the top 1 percent grew at about the same pace between the […]
The Wall Street Journal had a surprisingly decent piece yesterday on the efforts of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA and Machinists to unionize about 50,000 workers at Delta airlines. (The company’s 12,000 pilots are already represented by the Airline Pilots Association.) The WSJ pointed out that, taken together, the various representation elections are the largest […]
The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) has created an amazing series of animated lectures that I hope will change the way we present difficult conceptual material on the web. The RSA takes an audio excerpt from a standard spoken lecture and plays it over a video of a hand […]
Michael Powell and Motoko Rich have a nice story in today’s New York Times: “Across the U.S., Long Recovery Looks Like Recession.” The story includes a superb graphic: Which is the employment analog to a Washington Post graph of GDP that I wrote about in an earlier post: Both of which look a lot like […]
