Rudy Reynon is a martial artist, dancer, music producer and actor in Sacramento, CA. This is his pretty impressive 2010 demo reel.

One for the Hip-Hop, one for the money!

May I present – everything.

Danny Jelinek’s video magazine episode 12

Everything (Ep. 12) from dannyjelinek on Vimeo.

Featuring short works by:

• Nick Corirossi & Charles Ingram
• Brenan Campbell
• Eric Falconer
• Danny Jelinek
• Jason Whetzell

Hosted by: Sophie Kipner

This article is republished from VoxEU.org
Author: Richard Portes
originally published on VoxEU.org at 4 November 2010

The threat of a currency war between the US and China is one of the main concerns for the G20 ahead of this month’s meeting in Seoul. This column say that while policymakers appear to grasp some of the issues, they underestimate the impact of quantitative easing by large economies on exchange rates worldwide.
The headlines shout “currency wars”. The US believes China engages in “currency manipulation”. The authorities hesitate to declare this to the US Congress, and the Secretary of the Treasury says “competitive non-appreciation” instead. China accuses the US of excessively loose monetary policy, flooding the world with liquidity. There is some truth in both charges, but some exaggeration.
This is one of the key issues facing the G20. Exchange-rate pressures, global imbalances and rebalancing, spillovers and the desirability of policy coordination – these are at the centre of the economic interdependence between the developed and emerging market countries. All this is in the context of weak US and European recoveries from the Great Recession, the risk of deflation, and the likelihood of more quantitative easing (QE) by major central banks. Domestic issues and inability to get direct action on exchange rates has led the US to propose internationally agreed targets for current-account imbalances. The wheel goes round – these proposals bear some resemblance to those of Keynes at Bretton Woods, which the US then opposed.

Need for an analytic framework

Policies such as these cannot be properly assessed without an analytic framework. In the current discussion, the furthest this has gone is evocation of the “trilemma”: the impossibility of simultaneously maintaining open capital markets, nominal exchange-rate stability, and monetary policy autonomy. (We hear little of the “inconsistent quartet”, which adds trade openness to these three – but protectionism is indeed a potential weapon in the currency wars, and we must not disregard that threat.)
While policymakers in both developed economies and emerging markets are aware of this trilemma, they are not fully conscious of the international repercussions of QE by the largest economies when they are at the zero lower bound for interest rates. This column will explore these issues.

Background

The US dollar has already experienced a real effective exchange-rate depreciation of over 10% since early 2009, almost bringing it back to the low of early 2008. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has calculated that much of this is due to QE — the Fed’s $1.725 trillion asset purchases resulted in a 6.5% depreciation of the dollar (Neely 2010). The Bank of England has estimated that its QE resulted in a 4% depreciation of sterling (Joyce et al. 2010). So domestic QE does seem to have substantial international implications.
But the communiqué of 23 October 2010 by G20 finance ministers from their meeting in Gyeongju, while condemning “competitive devaluations”, avoids direct discussion of this spillover of monetary policy – which some might reasonably call a “competitive devaluation”: To quote the communiqué:

“Specifically, we will… continue with monetary policy which is appropriate to achieve price stability… move towards more market determined exchange rate systems that reflect underlying economic fundamentals and refrain from competitive devaluation of currencies. Advanced economies, including those with reserve currencies, will be vigilant against excess volatility and disorderly movements in exchange rates…”

This suggests that as long as QE does not lead to “disorderly” exchange rate changes, the monetary authorities can ignore its international effects. We shall examine whether this view is justified.

continue reading »

A music promo by Manu Meyre for the modern jazz band The Kandinsky Effect.

THE KANDINSKY EFFECT from Manu Meyre on Vimeo.

• director & motion designer : manu meyre
• painter : vassily kandinsky, composition VIII (1923)
• music band : the kandinsky effect, girl/boy song (edit)

More Information at:
Manu Meyre web site
The Kandinsky Effect web site

A great animation explaining why people can’t walk straight when blindfolded together with the results of an experiment.

From NPR
Try this: Put a blindfold on someone, take them to a park or a beach or a meadow and ask them to walk for as long as they can in a straight line.

read the full article at NPR

Google has produced a wonderful animated online book called “20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web” that explains many concepts and tools that the Internet is build of today.

Click on the image below for the link

Quote from Google blog:
“…We built “20 Things” in HTML5 so that we could incorporate features that hearken back to what we love about books—feeling the heft of a book’s cover, flipping a page or even reading under the covers with a flashlight. In fact, once you’ve loaded “20 Things” in the browser, you can disconnect your laptop and continue reading, since this guidebook works offline. As such, this illustrated guidebook is best experienced in Chrome or any up-to-date, HTML5-compliant modern browser…”

The book uses the latest Internet technologies in a sensible way so that features like off-line storage and the latest stylesheet formatting that are available with the most modern browsers are demonstrated, while at the same time the book is still accessible with older and non-web kit browser versions.

An outstanding use of HTML5, CSS stylesheets and graphics to explain these concepts.

Read it online at: 20thingsilearned.com/