Gay rights in the US, state by state

OECD – Your Better Life Index Average personal index for Germany, men, 15–24 How’s life? There is more to life than the cold numbers of GDP and economic statistics – This Index allows you to compare well-being across countries, based on 11 topics the OECD has identified as essential, in the areas of material living conditions and quality of life. Download executive summary Download the index data Learn more about the index Better Life BlogArchive Happiness pays For World Happiness Day our guest author suggests that money can't buy you happiness but happiness may get you more money. more ... Gender equality in the workplace Over the past twenty years, women have made huge gains in the workplace but full job equality is still far from reality. more ... Education for well-being: Online discussion We know education is an essential component of well-being, so what makes an education that promotes well-being? more ... Visit our blog Blog RSS feed Find Out MoreArchive Mar 19, 2014 Society at a Glance 2014: OECD Social Indicators

The Big Mac index 2012 vs. 1984: Young adults really do have it harder today All young adults who think they’re getting a raw deal in today’s economy, let me tell you about how it was back in my day. In 1984, my final undergraduate year of university, tuition cost more or less $1,000. I earned that much in a summer without breaking a sweat. When I went looking for a new car in 1986, the average cost was roughly half of what it is now. It was totally affordable. The average price of a house in Toronto back in 1984 was just over $96,000. I had it easier than today’s twentysomethings, and I have no problem saying so. This became clear as responses poured in to last week’s column tying the Quebec student protests to the financial challenges faced by people who are trying to make the jump from college and university into the work force. Some responses were heartfelt, like the one from a 78-year-old gentleman who said he grew up “in abject poverty on a farm” and worked to pay for his education. My sense is that’s what they’re trying to do. Back in my day?

Images & Réseaux VisIR regroupe des données géographiques, qualitatives, thématiques et descriptives issues des informations internes du pôle et permet de détecter les communautés actives et des domaines de compétences émergents. Cet outil innove dans la représentation visuelle de la base de données des projets collaboratifs du pôle, de leur impact sur le territoire et sur leurs filières d'activité. Fort de l’accueil favorable reçu avec le premier projet de recherche initié en 2010 par Images & Réseaux en partenariat avec Franck Ghitalla (INIST-CNRS) et l’Ecole de Design de Nantes, le pôle lance une V2,en collaboration avec Data Publica, interactive et en temps réel. Avec cette démarche unique en France, Images & Réseaux dispose d'une visualisation dynamique permettant la mesure de la coopération et de la fertilisation croisée entre acteurs/secteurs, facilitant la gestion d'une communauté complexe. Une version « tout public » est en libre accès sur le site du pôle.

The Internet map The map of the Internet Like any other map, The Internet map is a scheme displaying objects’ relative position; but unlike real maps (e.g. the map of the Earth) or virtual maps (e.g. the map of Mordor), the objects shown on it are not aligned on a surface. Mathematically speaking, The Internet map is a bi-dimensional presentation of links between websites on the Internet. Every site is a circle on the map, and its size is determined by website traffic, the larger the amount of traffic, the bigger the circle. Users’ switching between websites forms links, and the stronger the link, the closer the websites tend to arrange themselves to each other. Charges and springs To draw an analogy from classical physics, one may say that websites are electrically charged bodies, while links between them are springs. Also, an analogy can be drawn from quantum physics. Anyway, the real algorithm of plotting The Internet map is quite far from the analogies given above. Semantic web The Internet Phenomenon

The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) | Threat Level It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world's 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world's billions of public web pages. Once it's operational, the Utah Data Center will become, in effect, the NSA's cloud. 1 Geostationary satellites Four satellites positioned around the globe monitor frequencies carrying everything from walkie-talkies and cell phones in Libya to radar systems in North Korea. 2 Aerospace Data Facility, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado 3 NSA Georgia, Fort Gordon, Augusta, Georgia 5 NSA Hawaii, Oahu

CCI de France Visualizing 50 years of The Rolling Stones An interactive map of their live-show story. British tour The Rolling Stones 1963 British Tour was the first Rolling Stones concert tour. The tour commenced on September 29 and concluded on November 3, 1963. 2,812km. 1st British Tour The Rolling Stones 1964 1st British Tour was a concert tour. 1,438km. 2nd British Tour The Rolling Stones 1964 2nd British Tour was a concert tour. 4,063km. 3rd British Tour The Rolling Stones 1964 3rd British Tour was a concert tour by the band. 2,120km. Irish Tour The Rolling Stones 1965 Irish Tour was the first concert tour of Northern Ireland and Ireland by The Rolling Stones. 358km. Far East Tour The Rolling Stones 1965 Far East Tour was the first concert tour of Oceania by the band. 16,016km. The Rolling Stones 1965 1st British Tour commenced on March 5 and concluded on March 18, 1965. 1,252km. 1st European Tour The Rolling Stones 1965 1st European Tour was the first concert tour of Scandinavia by the band. 768km. 1st American Tour 25,952km. 2nd European tour 0km. 138km.

Legal Trips to Cuba Made Easier for Americans Don’t expect to stock up on those coveted Cuban cigars, however. Travelers aren’t allowed to bring cigars or rum back to the States, according to the Treasury Department. Demand for Cuba is so strong that tour operators say that many of the trips already have long waiting lists. Learning in Retirement, an educational program associated with the University of Wisconsin in La Crosse, which is offering a 10-day people-to-people trip in April, said more than 65 people have already expressed interest for its 35 spots. “That’s just through word of mouth,” said Burt Altman, a retired professor who organized the trip. “We haven’t even put out the itinerary.” “It’s the forbidden fruit,” said Mr. Following is a list of planned people-to-people trips to Cuba. LEARNING IN RETIREMENT, uwlax.edu/conted/lir/index.html, is offering a 10-day trip in April 2012 visiting a range of professionals from Santiago de Cuba to Trinidad including a violin maker and a dairy farm operator.

Carbon map How can you map the world to show global data in an immediately clear way? How can you show two datasets at once to see how they compare? Kiln, a partnership of Guardian writer Duncan Clark and developer Robin Houston has come up with this beautiful new take on the globe. Watch the animated intro or click on the topics and see the map move before your eyes. Adding shading lets you compare two datasets to see how they relate – so you can see clearly how poorest countries have the fastest growing populations but the lowest emissions • The map works best in newest versions of Chrome, Firefox or Safari• Who made this graphic?

Mobile Edition With the rise of social media sites, companies are getting hit with a blizzard of unstructured data, and must now find cost-effective ways to integrate and analyze the collective pool of big data to generate granular business insights. With the rise of social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube, companies are getting hit with a blizzard of unstructured data. This data onslaught comes on top of rapid growth in the amount of customer data housed in enterprise systems. A recent Intel white paper may have said it best: "We are in the midst of a revolution in the way companies access, manage, and use data. To stay on top of it all, many companies are deploying Hadoop, an open-source parallel processing framework, to process and analyze social media data on distributed server clusters. This next-generation processor family is a great platform for running analytics on big data in private cloud solutions and enterprise data centers, as well as in cloud deployments. More Insights