Wikipedia Backbars is a GreaseMonkey script to add histogram backgrounds to Wikipedia tables. It’s a great way to make tables more graphic, to visualize the patterns in the excellent, but usually very dry tables in Wikipedia.
It’s early days yet but it’s already usable enough to give it a spin.
To install it just download it from its UserScripts page. You need to have GreaseMonkey (version 0.8 or more), a Firefox extension, installed first.
Believe the hype. Please take a while and go play with it! Its help, as is Wolfram’s tradition, is excellent, the best introduction.
How to describe it? It’s for data what Google was to text, what Wikipedia was to knowledge. It’s to the calculator what Wikipedia was to the encyclopedia, what Google was to the library catalog. It’s the most exciting, hopeful thing to happen to the web, to the world, since both Google and Wikipedia.
And with a mission “to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone”, it opens up as big and inspiring a project for this generation.
I believe it’s a historic moment and could not let it pass unmarked.
Travelling all across the developed world this question’s naturally recurring. Here some likely fragments of the answer:
limits on people’s supply and demand
artificial
citizenship
discrimination (racial, sexual…)
natural
unique, hard-to-learn language and culture (say Japanese)
geographic isolation
scale of market
personal ability
work ethics and kata
education or experience
intellect, body and disposition
governments
regulations
competition policies
taxation
tariffs
knowledge and application of economic metaprinciples
division of labor
free trade
private property (the machinery of freedom)
social capital and infrastructure
urbanization
tangible
access to technology
roads, telephones, public health measures…
public transportation
information technology
intangible
rule of law
security
public education, literacy
access to finance
intellectual property, public commons
access to legal, tradeable property (think Hernando de Soto)
exploitation
freeloading/happenstance
like how speakers from any country that speak English get access to unique opportunities for no other reason than speaking English
natural resources (think Arab countries)
currency as investment
It’s a stab. Please help with more ideas that come to mind.
Predictably, I found this deeply, personally moving.
[Having to live in Canada so his spouse can work,] He misses interaction with colleagues. It hinders efficiency, slows work. He is physically drained from travel. He is frustrated that he cannot put down roots in America, and maybe start his own company, because he cannot leave Google, his visa sponsor.
He says he feels, on one hand, great gratitude that America gave him extraordinary opportunity. But he says he fulfilled his side of the bargain by striving and succeeding. [He became a multimillionaire with Google stock.] “Dude, I love this country,” he said.
But he doesn’t feel loved back: “My devotion is unrequited.”
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