“What are you doing next?” is the most popular question I’ve been asked this past year. As a senior in college, this question, at first, was extremely stressful. However, today I can confidently respond, “I’m going to Grad school,” which I’ve noticed is a popular response amongst my peers. Furthermore, the economic crisis has elicited a plethora of reports and articles about ‘taking the next step.’ For instance, a recent article on nytimes.com, What is a Master’s Degree Worth, proved to be an extremely popular opinion article that was posted just two weeks ago. Is the answer more education?

I was curious to see if this evoked Americans to Google search graduate programs more this year than in the past five years collectively. Using GeoCommons, I uploaded the statistic of ‘Search Volume Index’ for each state—within the last year and within the past five years. Using Maker!, I mapped the difference between the two indexes; click on each state below to view the value of the difference. Just over half of the states show an increased volume index for the past year in comparison to the past five years combined. I predicted the difference would be larger within each individual state, thinking that this year would be a radical year for furthering education. Without drastic change, there cannot be any inference drawn, especially without considering other potential variables that could alter this search pattern.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Last September, as the big honchos of the financial world - the regulators and the bankers - were witnessing the imminent collapse of Lehman Brothers, they realized that they were facing a far bigger problem: The possible collapse of American International Group (AIG), the biggest insurance company in the world. If AIG collapsed, so the theory went, it would cause a chain-reaction that could potentially prove fatal to large number of financial institutions all over the world, plunging the world economies into a financial abyss!

Fear of financial meltdown was the reason given then for the taxpayer paid bailout of AIG, that would eventually rise to more than $160 billion. However what was not clear then, in what way AIG bailout would save the rest of the world. Even as some in the media did expose the role played by the independently operating but wholly owned subsidiary AIGFP and its unit in London headed by Mr. Cassano, under the name of innovative financial products and services was essentially gambling with AIG investors money. And yet it was not clear who were the partners in this gambling scheme who would ultimately get the counterparty claims.

Both AIG and the Feds hemmed and hawed around to release the names of these counterparties under the legalistic language of confidentiality agreements. And it would have continued that way till the AIG bonus-babies scandal broke last week, forcing AIG to issue the press release that gave partial list of trading partners/counter parties.

Below are the maps that show locations of financial institutions who were paid by AIG in the counterparty claims for the complex financial transactions such as Credit Default Swaps (CDS), repurchase of mortgage-backed securities and security lending obligations.

From these maps it would appear that the problem is limited to Western Europe and the U.S. And yet nearly $22 billion was paid to other counter parties, who probably are scattered all across the globe. The partial list of Western European institutions and those in the U.S. reads like who’s who in the financial world. A cross check with Madoff’s clients and TARP list reveals that many of these are the same players who lost billions in Madoff’s ponzi scheme and are also getting TARP money and its quite likely that these same set of players will show up for TARP-II, the TALF!

Talk about small-world! In the name of spreading risk, they have collectively managed to plunge the U.S. and rest of the world into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Your tax $ at work: AIG’s payment to financial institutions for Credit Default Swaps (CDS)

View the map in Maker! here

Your tax $ at work: AIG’s payment to financial institutions for Mortgage-backed securities

View the map in Maker! here

Your tax $ at work: AIG’s payment to financial institutions for Security lending obligations

View the map in Maker! here

Explore interactive map on the Maker!
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Popularity: 17% [?]

A group of UCLA geographers published a paper yesterday in the MIT International Review entitled “Finding Osama bin Laden: An Application of Biogeographic Theories and Satellite Imagery”. The UCLA team used purely open source data, including “Landsat ETM+, Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, Defense Meteorological Satellite, QuickBird”. Then used a variety of commons geographic analysis techniques, “distance-decay theory, island biogeography theory, and life history characteristics” to predict high probability locations for Osama Bin Laden. The story has already been picked up by 90 media outlets and has been popping up on the front page of several major news outlets.

It would never make it out of the labyrinth of classification schemas in the US government, but it would be fascinating to see what a crowdsourced search for Bin Laden would turn up if better data was made available from the intel/defense community. Since the government data will never be released we thought we could at least help make the open source data easily accesible. So, we took the available data in the MIT article plus relevant data on Afghanistan and pushed it into GeoCommons. We’ve embedded a map with our own take below.

To view this map in GeoCommons Maker! click here.

In addition to the UCLA data we’ve added gridded population data for the area. A big part of the UCLA thesis was Osama would be, “in a larger town rather than a smaller and more isolated town where extinction rate would be higher”. So, the gridded data gives a rough view of population densities in the remote Tora Bora region.

Source data for the maps is here:

Structure Locations of Possible Hiding Spots of Osama Bin Laden, Parachinar, Pakistan, 2009
Tora Bora 10 KM Buffer Rings
Gridded Population Data, Afghanistan and Pakistan border near Tora Bora

Would be great to see what other folks can do with the data to promote other perspectives. Also a nice opportunity to show the power of opening data up for better analysis, QA and alternative perspectives. Kudos to the UCLA team - great to see geographers in the news for doing what they do best.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Australia’s southern state of Victoria has struggled to contain the brush fires that are tearing through the state. Police officials have confirmed the death of 181 people thus far, and expect that number to exceed 200.

Police suspect arsonists played a role in starting the blazes that have quickly gotten out of control. The fires have become one of the nations worst natural disasters. Brush fires are not an uncommon occurrence in Australia, however the magnitude of these fires is unusually high. Gary Morgan, chief executive of the Brushfire Cooperative Research Centre, is quoted in a Wall Street Journal article saying, “climate change and drought are altering the nature, the ferocity and the duration of the brushfires.”

There are many theories on why these particular fires have gotten out of hand. Some point to the abnormal weather conditions over this past weekend, in which temperatures set record highs and humidity levels plummeted.

Others believe that extended climate changes over time are to blame. Blaming the lack of precipitation in the area along with rising temperatures in population centers. The area around Melbourne has suffered from drought conditions for nearly a decade.

Here is a map of Australia mashing together the recorded fires from the previous 7 days / 48 Hours / 24 hours along with rainfall measurements. As you can see the southern part of Australia collected very little rain this month. Please zoom in for a better perspective.

Others go further and believe that the shifting population in in Australia is to blame. They believe that the recent trend of people moving into more rural areas to escape the city is to blame. Stating that these newcomers are less familiar than longtime rural residents with precautions needed to prevent wildfires and are less prepared to escape when fires occur.

Whatever the causes lets hope that the fires are brought under control quickly.

Click here to view a few data sets in the Finder! platform regarding the fires in Australia.

Popularity: 24% [?]