Interesting Snippets

The paper, Growth in a Time of Debt, was written by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff and published in 2010…. The link it draws between high levels of debt and negative average economic growth has been used by right-leaning politicians to justify austerity budgets: slashing government expenditure and reducing budget deficits in a bid to curtail the growth of debt.
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A new paper, however, suggests that the data itself is in error. …
It turns out that the Reinhart and Rogoff spreadsheet contained a simple coding error. The spreadsheet was supposed to calculate average values across twenty countries in rows 30 to 49, but in fact it only calculated values in 15 countries in rows 30 to 44.

Google just launched The Peanut Gallery, a new tool for its Chrome browser, which allows users to add their own title cards to clips from classic movies. …No typing involved: just say “Action!” to get your computer’s mic going, and speak the dialogue as you’d like it to appear

The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) has launched an initiative to collect data about the cats of London into a map. It’s called, perhaps unsurprisingly, Cat Map.

Cat Map invites mog owners or acquaintances to plot their feline counterparts onto a mapping tool, uploading a photo, an address, the cat’s name, colour and age as well as a description