Ironically at a moment when organizing files into folders become obsolete, I wrote a little visualization application for hierarchical file systems.

Given a folder this app draws a tree in OpenGL showing the hierarchy of the subfolders.

ScreenShot of infovis - 3D view

This app was written for a lecture in Informationsvisualisierung.

Labels: coding, TU

I just finished a work on the Intertemporal Effects of Deregulation. It's based on a paper called Macroeconomic Effects of Regulation and Deregulation in Goods and Labor Market from Blanchard and Giavazzi.

In a Nutshell: Deregulation in the labor market yields lower wages and possible higher unemployment in the short run. Truly a negative effect for workers. However, in the long run those higher profits for firms will attract new firms to enter the market. Increased competition will drive the number of products, prices and employment up. This should bring real wages back to the level before deregulation.
An intertemporal tradeoff indeed.

A Definition of Deregulation from The Economist:
Cutting red tape. The process of removing legal or quasi-legal restrictions on the amount of competition, the sorts of business done, or the prices charged within a particular industry. Dur- ing the last two decades of the 20th century, many governments committed to the free market pursued policies of liberalisation based on substantial amounts of deregulation hand-in-hand with the privatisation of industries owned by the state. The aim was to decrease the role of government in the economy and to in- crease competition. Even so, red tape is alive and well. In the United States, with some 60 federal agencies issuing more than 1,800 rules a year, in 1998 the Code of Federal Regulations was more than 130,000 pages thick. However, not all regulation is necessarily bad. According to estimates by the American Office of Management and Budget, the annual cost of these rules was $289 billion, but the annual benefits were $298 billion.

Labels: Economics, TU