Gran viñeta, en La Información, de Ferrán Martin.

Imagen colgada con su permiso. Gracias!

@brunosan Por supuesto. Aquí tienes el link: humor.lainformacion.com/ferran-martin/… Un saludo.

— Ferran Martín (@ferranmartin) February 21, 2012

Mine was a tax complex year. Started unemployed, 3 months as international contractor for USA in Spain, and then employee in the USA. I decided to pay H&R Block (leaders in the market of tax preparation) to make the taxes for me.

 It took H&R Block one hour to make them. The guy was 50% of the time distracted talking on the phone or to other employees. He seemed to know what he did, but was a bit hesitant when doing the foreign income credit. He spoke broken spanish. His english was neither good, he could not spell “Scientist” or “Environment” (I am not kidding, I had to tell him twice, and write it down). The cost? 400$. I would say is highly overpriced, and they will not explain the cost… All they said was that it was expensive because I had non-common stuff. I doubt I´ll go ever again. If only IRS had a “Programa PADRE” (they draft it for you, free).

Spain Taxes: While in Spain I worked for a USA company, that paid me into a USA bank account. But I worked via Internet from Spain, so I became an official tax-paying spanish contractor (this is how you do it). From the money I made then, I paid to Hacienda, as non-resident, roughly 23% of taxes. I even called the IRS and they told me that that amount would be discounted. In the end it was only partly so, but fair. I guess.

USA Taxes: From my income in the USA (the one I made while at Spain and my normal salary) I paid, after all adjustments, roughly 13% of federal taxes and 5% DC state taxes.

In total, for all goverments, I´ve paid around 27% of income tax.

These numbers don´t really match the general tax brackets (USA or Spain), but I am not a typical case.

Now, I do feel proud of paying taxes. We need them, everyone should pay their taxes. In Spain 22% of the Economy is believed to (illegally) evade taxes. 8% in USA.

Dedicated to those who always stand up,

till they aren’t.

In Microsoft Windows it makes the window fill the screen… (and I don´t really know what it does when the window is already maximized). In Mac it switches the size of the window from “application default” to “user set”. Its name is “Zoom”, and you can also find it on the Window Menu.

It means that every app comes with a window size by default. If you resize it, it will come back to the default size if you click it. And if you click again it comes back to whatever size you set before.

Makes sense? Handy if you make it a hot key and you need to swap windows a lot and only part of one window is needed at times.

The extra mile. The button only remembers the size, so it won´t move the window unless it needs to adjust the windows size. However, moving the window leaves the application default mode, so if you just move the window from the application default with resize, the green button will make nothing. And it will forget your previous -truly user defined- size. (…)

Btw, officially Apple defines it as:

Zoom:

This action method toggles the size and location of the window between its standard state (provided by the application as the “best” size to display the window’s data) and its user state (a new size and location the user may have set by moving or resizing the window).

Today I went to a lunch meeting with the Apps 4 Climate folks. It is basically a challenge for developers to make apps using the vast archive of open data at the Bank.

It was great to see such a motivated team behind the project. We talkedabout the challenge itself, requirements and timelines. It was very appropriate for Habiba Gitay to point out the importance of rightful sourcing attribution (Most times the Bank acts as a portal that archives someone else data). Alex Barth also gave a talk about building maps with World Bank Climate Data (slides here).

The main part of the event were focus groups to brainstorm about ideas and about the potential of such competition. Here are 9+ ideas with mock names to motivate your brain:

1. “Gap Finder“. The Bank has a massive amount of data. But, do we know all we ought to address climate change rightfully? Where are the gaps? There are obviously things we don´t know we don´t know, but there are many we know we don´t know.  The app would poinpoint/rank/visualize these and perhaps try to fill this gaps with proxy data, crowdourcing or advocate to contact those responsible to fill them.
2. “So What“. This is an app thinking from the point of view of average citizen, not researchers, govs or NGOs. What should the average person know about climate change. In general and in particular around a topic or a place.
3. “Climate Birds“. The idea here is to leverage highly motivated specialized groups of people. For example bird watchers. There is a huge outcome if we can find a way to articulate their motivation towards addressing climate change. To increase awareness, to crowdsource data gathering or data verification… Say an app to report location and volume of migratory species, or an app to monitor nesting behavior and match or correlate them to available relevant data.
4. “Climate UI“. An app to weed out non relevant data for your purposes. There are thousands of indicators, countries, years, models, options, documents, … Figuring out which ones are relevant for you, and gathering them is in itself a non-trivial task. An app to help select and provide guidance in this regard would be certainly helpful. Something like VirGo or Simbad in Astronomy, but for climate.
5. “Climate liberator“. With the increasing number of dataset and work being done in the climate arena, it becomes increasingly difficult to decide how to publish your data, with which criteria, where to host it, … This app would guide the whole process and help you create the documentation, as well as streamlining the pipeline to make it available for every one.
6. “What if Calculator“. What if I were to reduce my energy consumption by 40%? What if I use the bike instead of the taxi? What if I use reusable bags instead of plastic ones? Some of this calculations are harder than others, but a qualitative answer is in itself valuable and might also connect to relevant data available in the Bank. Now, what if 10% of the population wold do the same? What would the impact be then?
7. “Climate Changes You“. Most of the apps and effort is put into working the available data, which is mostly national level. However, solutions to climate change are generally local, and we as individuals can help face the challenges. This app would leverage the potential of everyone to fact check and gather data. Just like Wikipedia allows everyone to collaborate in articles, just like OpenStreetMap allows everyone to collaborate maps, this app would allow anyone to collaborate in the data effort for climate. The trick here would be to ensure/address data quality, perhaps with a reputation system on the data and the collaborator.
8. “Climate Cloud“. As data becomes more complex, more used, and more needed, properly hosting and serving the resources becomes a challenge. This app would bring climate data to a dedicated cloud service,with centralized resources to streamline comparisons, calculations, push updates, request explanations, …
9. “Climate fact sheet generator” The Bank has a very nice online API and other resources to access almost any piece of data any time. However, sometimes you need to have offline material for moments and places where there is no resources or time to go online. This app would help create quick fact sheets with the relevant data you choose, for your set of countries, region or the whole world. This app would use the available API and an automated preparation tool like LaTeX or ImageMagick to create quick beautiful handbooks with a few clicks (and a printer, or perhaps a cloud printer)
   

   ¿ Rails+api.worldbank.org+LaTeX ?

10. What other ideas can you come up with? I´ll be glad to include them here*.

*I am tempted to include our Index at the Global Adaptation Institute. Unfortunately, the Index (and its website) is not eligible for this competition, because part of our team at the Institute is related to the Bank. However, the Index is open source and open data (using  also World Bank climate data) , and I would be more than glad to guide anyone to build something on top of it, and present it to the competition. I would actually love that. Including building from our node.js site (source code available on request)

As you can see, and it was specifically mentioned on the meeting, apps can be of any nature, as long as they fulfill the rules. Roughly, I can see a few (interlinked) types of apps:

• Visualization or mapping. Quite powerful as message carriers. There are many amazing tools to make your life easy, like TileMill
• Tools for technical users: To make your life easy to select, download, upload or mine the data.
• Awareness/Advocacy for the general audience: Quizzes, Games, Calculators.
• Mashups: Combine several sources to discover new outcomes.
• Crowdsourcing: Leverage the audience to provide input, not only to consume the output.
• Portals: Index and categorize available data or projects.

Good luck!

You can see now the whole text in the feed.

Thanks @zugaldia for noticing.

[Cross posted at Global Adaptation Institute]

Today I´ve published the article “Más Acción, Menos Palabras,” in the Madrid-based daily national newspaper, La Rázon. One of the goals of the article is that in the wake of no clear path forward on tackling climate mitigation, concrete steps taken by world leaders attending the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting can harness the power of the private sector in helping those most vulnerable adapt to the challenges of climate change and other global forces:

The harsh reality is that, after seventeen annual international [UNFCCC COP] conferences, intentions still fall far behind action. The necessary consensus for taking global steps to address climate change becomes lost among competing agendas. They have become business meetings where solutions are not coordinated. Adaptation is a parallel track, and complementary to tackle climate change.

The meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos this week brings together over a thousand leaders representing many sectors of the economy that drive its evolution. Not surprisingly, one of the issues at the top of the agenda is climate change and global adaptation to this phenomenon.

Read the whole article, in spanish, here.

Nota: El primer borrador del artículo tenía el doble de extensión de la recomendable para su publicación, con más ejemplos y explicaciones de la lógica de adaptación y del papel del sector privado.

Yes, the Sun is pretty active lately. Not many hours ago it did flare on its surface. With such luck that the ejecta pointed towards us. That´s rather unusual considering the tiny size of the Earth in comparison to the huge distance from the Sun.

Origianl source: https://www.facebook.com/game.esp

The flared occurred because a massive magnetic rope emerged from the Sun, it twisted once there and, hence, there was a reconnection (like a shortcut) that liberated huge amounts of energy and light to space. (that´s magnetohydrodynamics 101… the how, no one really knows why)

Right then the Earth reacted to the light. We have an atmosphere to protect us from that massive light in Ultraviolet, but that also can blackout radio communications, heat the outer atmosphere and endanger low lying satellites. Luckily this one wasn´t that big.

The ejecta, a massive cloud of highly magnetized plasma travels through space and hits the Earth (in this case partly sideways). The Earth has its own magnetic field to shield us. That makes the plasma bend towards the poles, where they enter our atmosphere. When they hit the atmosphere it shines (the auroras, greenish/reddish lights in the sky)

Source: http://iswa.gsfc.nasa.gov/iswa/iSWA.html

The sun has cycles of 11 years of activity. We approach a peak in the next 2 or 3 years.
btw. There was a hypothesis that the Sun might be an influence in climate change, but it was largely proved irrelevant. If it does, the effect is way smaller than other causes, like us.

If you want to procrastinate more. Here´s the tool I made for shortly before coming to gai.org
The region that erupted is on the upper band, to the right.
http://solphys.nrl.navy.mil/users/bruno/docs/euvi-synoptic/284/movietool.html

Hope my fellow astrophysicists don´t mind my quick & dirty explanation

Subtle but important difference

I predict passwords to be replaced by smartphones with a qrcode-esque solution. Seriously. it.slashdot.org/story/12/01/13…

—
Antonio Zugaldia (@zugaldia) January 13, 2012

I tend to agree, and this is one way, I think, it could work. Just scanning 2 QR-Codes either by using your phone’s camera or the computer´s camera.

Your computer has a camera.

1. The server (e.g. Gmail) asks who you are. You show your QR-code. That code would be created on the phone using the algorithm that changes the patter every few seconds. The QR-code is read by the integrated camera most computers now have.
2. The server accepts the ID, but still needs to confirm he is a trustworthy server and that that the login/QR-code was just not used by someone else. The server connects with the phone (since it knows the info from the QR-code) and send a random number with which the phone makes another QR-Code. The user has to show the new QR-code.You are now sure that the person holding the phone is the person trying to access the account.
   
3. [Extra] The server (or the phone) shows few pieces of information only the user would know. Some correct, some not. If you click the wrong one, you are out. Both server and phone log you out.

If the phone has a camera: