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Vanity Plate Fail

Shared from Google Reader - Fri, 04 Jun 2010 - 06:00

Words cannot describe this.. What was he thinking??

Submitted by: zzyxer via Fail Uploader





license plate - Recreation - Autos - Collecting - Transportation

Keeping up-to-date on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill

Shared from Google Reader - Fri, 21 May 2010 - 14:58
(Cross-posted on the Lat Long blog)
It is estimated that at least 6 million gallons of oil have leaked into the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon explosion a month ago. Cleanup efforts are underway, but the oil has spread extensively around the Gulf and along the southern U.S. coastline. Oil has begun washing up on the beaches of Louisiana and the delicate wetlands along the Mississippi River, and can spread to Florida and throughout the Gulf as weather conditions change. This sequence of images, coming from NASA’s MODIS satellites, illustrates the movement and growth of the oil slick over the past few weeks:

April 25, 2010

April 29, 2010

May 9, 2010

May 17, 2010
The last image, taken earlier this week (on May 17), shows the coastal areas currently at risk from the spreading oil, and can help those working on the wide range of relief efforts.


You can view this and other MODIS imagery in Google Earth by downloading this KML. You can also view additional imagery and find other resources and news at our oil spill crisis response page.
Posted by Pete Giencke, GIS Data Engineer

Replay it: Google search across the Twitter archive

Shared from Google Reader - Wed, 14 Apr 2010 - 06:00
Since we first introduced real-time search last December, we’ve added content from MySpace, Facebook and Buzz, expanded to 40 languages and added a top links feature to help you find the most relevant content shared on updates services like Twitter. Today, we’re introducing a new feature to help you search and explore the public archive of tweets.

With the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, there’s a constant online conversation about breaking news, people and places — some famous and some local. Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted. We want to give you a way to search across this information and make it useful.

Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try it out, click “Show options” on the search results page, then select “Updates.” The first page will show you the familiar latest and greatest short-form updates from a comprehensive set of sources, but now there’s a new chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period. Here we’ve searched for [golden gate park] and browsed to see March, 2010:


The chart shows the relative volume of activity on Twitter about the topic. As you can see, there are daily spikes in the afternoon (when parks are the most fun) and an unusually high spike on March 27. Clicking on the 27th, you’ll discover it was a sunny Saturday, which may explain the increased traffic on Twitter. People were tweeting about disc golf and tennis, biking, riding a party bus, craving chips and salsa...the kind of local, time-specific information that up until now would be almost impossible to find online.

By replaying tweets, you can explore any topic that people have discussed on Twitter. Want to know how the news broke about health care legislation in Congress, what people were saying about Justice Paul Stevens’ retirement or what people were tweeting during your own marathon run? These are the kinds of things you can explore with the new updates mode.

The replay feature is rolling out now and will be available globally in English within the next couple days (if you want to try it now, try out this special link). For our initial release, you can explore tweets going back to February 11, 2010, and soon you’ll be able to go back as far as the very first tweet on March 21, 2006.

All of us are just beginning to understand the many ways real-time information and short-form web content will be useful in the future, and we think being able to make use of historical information is an important part of that. As for me, after some hard work on real-time search, it’s time for a virtual vacation to relive one of my favorite moments of the Winter Games.

Posted by Dylan Casey, Product Manager for Real-Time Search

15 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wealth And Inequality In America

Shared from Google Reader - Fri, 09 Apr 2010 - 06:33

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Cliché, sure, but it's also more true than at any time since the Gilded Age.

The poor are getting poorer, wages are falling behind inflation, and social mobility is at an all-time low. 

If you're in that top 1%, life is grand.

Here's 15 Mind-Blowing Charts About Wealth And Inequality In America >The gap between the top 1% and everyone else hasn't been this bad since the Roaring Twenties

This chart shows average income of the top 1% as a multiple of average income of the bottom 90%.

Bigger chart @ The Nation


Half of America has 2.5% of the wealth

Source: Institute for Policy Studies


Half of America has 0.5% of the stocks and bonds

Source: Institute for Policy Studies


Look at the gap grow!

Source: Professor G. William Domhoff


The last two decades were great... except for American workers


Real average earnings have not increased in 50 years


But savings rates are sinking


Poor Americans have a SLIM CHANCE of rising to the upper middle class

Source: NBER


Republican tax cuts have significantly increased the gap

Source:


Income tax is getting lower and lower for the rich


America spreads the wealth FAR LESS than other developed countries


America's income spread is nearly twice the OECD average

Source: Economist


The gap is NOT growing in other countries, like France


Inequality is worst around Wall Street and Oil Land


If you aren't in the top 1%, then you're getting a bum deal

Normalized to 1979, the top 1% have seen their share of America's income more than double. The bottom 90% have seen their portion shrink.

Source: Afferent Input


Now read...

20 Cities That Have Completely Missed The Recovery

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