From the monthly archives: January 2009

Recent Work on Open Economics

By Rufus Pollock On January 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Over the Christmas break I had a chance to make some substantial improvements/additions to our Open Economics including:

Improved javascript graphing. Extend Millenium Development Goals package and added web interface. First efforts at ‘Where Does My Money Go’ Aim: Dig up govt finance info and visualize the results (online) http://okfn.org/wiki/projects/Where_Does_My_Money_Go

More details on [...]

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Dutch Study on Filesharing

By Rufus Pollock On January 23, 2009 · 3 Comments

A new Dutch study on the effects of filesharing has just come out. Unfortunately it is all in dutch! However, courtesy of online translation, it appears the basic message is that filesharing has a net positive impact on welfare (though they term this the ‘economic’ impact):

File sharing has net positive economic impact

The [...]

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The Wrestler

By Rufus Pollock On January 19, 2009 · Leave a Comment

7/10. Still fairly unrelenting in his doom and gloom (cf. Requiem for a Dream) Aronofsky returns with a star turn by Mickey Rourke as an aging wrestler. More engaging than previous Aronofsky outings — in part because we were given some grounds for hope (even if they were later taken away) — this was definitely [...]

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Slumdog Millionaire

By Rufus Pollock On January 13, 2009 · Leave a Comment

7/10. The first section of film was excellent. This was the part covering our hero’s life story up to the present via the (nice) conceit of explaining to the police of how he knows ‘all the answers’. Unfortunately, the second part, which takes place in the present was much less good. Not only was the [...]

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Imagemagick convert notes

By Rufus Pollock On January 12, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Helping myself remember how to do common things using imagemagick’s (excellent but many-optioned) convert utility.

convert -scale 10% {in} {out} # convert to black and white convert -type Grayscale {in} {out} convert -monochrome {in} {out} # invert colours convert -negate in out convert -rotate {in} {out} # make the given colour (e.g. here white) transparent [...]
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