Coming soon – report by EPC Space Fellow James C. Bennett http://t.co/OnaFjAu4 Space: The Final Investment Frontier
Coming soon – report by EPC Sp…
January 30th, 2012December 2011 Police.uk data late this month
January 30th, 2012Posted: January 29th, cialis sale 2012 Author: Dan No Comments »
Some of you have been asking when we will have the data ready on UKCrimeStats for the month of December 2011 – so were we !
Unfortunately, find as 3rd party developers, we are beholden to the external release by Police.uk of the data which is meant to appear on the 25th of every month. Our inquiries have now established (they didn’t tell us in advance) that it won’t be ready until 31st January and we need a bit of time to put it on our own system after that.
Over on our forum section that we launched a few months ago – read the opening post about it here, we are keeping tabs on data errors and the NPIA’s and Police Force’s progress in correcting them. We have had some successes – notably with Sussex Police neighbourhood data, neighbhourhood population data (now just 39 out of 5,000 plus rather than 500 with populations of 1 or 0) and Cheshire ASB data – but there is still a long way to go. We need to see a lot more progress on the very incomplete locations of Police Stations across England and Wales. for example. One year on and 5 Police Forces have not seen fit to report these at all – Wiltshire, North Yorkshire, Humberside, Gloucestershire and Derbyshire – and others only partially. We need to know where the Police Stations are so we can start to filter out the distortionary effect of crimes with no location assigned to a Police Station on or near a specific road.
With the impending full calendar year of data, of particular importance for this month’s update are Hertfordshire’s Jan 2011 and Vehicle totals which look transposed. We told the NPIA about this at the beginning of December 2011 and a few times since then. So let’s hope they get it checked and fixed this time.
In the meantime, thanks for your patience everyone, we will have an update with you soon.
Good blog by Isobel Coleman – …
January 27th, 2012Good blog by Isobel Coleman – Open Data for Better Government http://t.co/UcfI6mot via @AddThis
Subsidy-free Solar Grid Parity…
January 25th, 2012Subsidy-free Solar Grid Parity still a long way off for UK but getting closer in India Bloomberg http://t.co/mpstJC9u via @Bloomberg
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says P…
January 20th, 2012Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says Portugal not Greece will ultimately determine fate of eurozone – Telegraph http://t.co/rYrfFVBr via @Telegraph
QR codes now uploaded for 7 million pages on UKCrimeStats
January 18th, 2012Posted: January 18th, malady 2012 Author: Dan No Comments »
Last week, for the first time, I actually used the QR code (Quick Response) scanner on my Blackberry and I belatedly realised what a great invention they are. No difficult and long urls – just scan and it takes you straight there and then you can share the QR code by facebook or email. UKCrimeStats has a huge and growing database of monthly information and we’re always trying to make it as accessible as possible. So we’ve decided to experiment and introduce an individual QR code for every single page on the site, right down to the individual crimes like this one, no. 1003 and streets like Oxford Street – QR code below.
EPC Media coverage page now up…
January 16th, 2012EPC Media coverage page now updated http://t.co/jvtMZqLd – a lot more to come
Rapture II TV Ad: http://t.co/…
January 12th, 2012Rapture II TV Ad: http://t.co/16TDa4aT via @youtube – Oliver Lewis, pilule cialis brother of Dan Lewis of EPC – forgive the personal plug !
Gas Boom Has Youngstown Making…
January 10th, 2012Gas Boom Has Youngstown Making Steel Again – Bloomberg http://t.co/fDTgCjTZ no question the positive econ impact of shale gas in USA is real
Eastern Europe – the calamitous cost of Foreign Currency Mortgages
January 10th, 201215 years ago, I went to go and live and work in Luxembourg for what turned out to be a very happy few years in pre-euro euroland. Latterly I was working in the Middle Office of a Corporate Treasury Department where I became familiar with interest rate swaps and how widely debt was priced around the world. I subsequently did a little investigation into taking out a foreign currency mortgage – specifically in Japanese Yen – which back then was paying next to no interest unlike all the other major currencies. Alas, I was politely rebuffed on the grounds of not really being a player !
Obviously, a lot has changed since then. Today, it seems you don’t have to be a player at all. In fact, anyone can get them – especially if you are working/middle class Eastern European and not remotely interested in hedging for averse currency movements. So what happened?
This Economist article from a couple of years ago gets it right by calling it Austria’s very own subprime invention. This table below, also old, sums it up quite nicely.
Since then of course, it’s got substantially worse in nations like Hungary – now with a BB+ rating – as the Swiss Franc has superspiked in value, massively increasing the cost of CHF-based mortgages across Eastern and Central Europe – about 1.7 million in total apparently.
So it’s not just Euroland that is in trouble with the Euro. What Donald Rumsfeld used to call New Europe is in trouble too – but with a quite different kind of currency problem.
Would that our economic life and times be simple and predictable again, with all our living standards gently rising year after year !