Data Visualization: Central Banks

Iron Ore Company of Canada
Image via Wikipedia

Trying to compare the transparency of central banks via the data visualization of two very different central banks.

One is Reserve Bank of India and the other is Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Here are some points-

1) The federal bank gives you a huge clutter of charts to choose from and sometimes gives you very difficult to understand charts.

see http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/global_economy/usecon_charts.html

and http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/directors_charts/us18chart.pdf

us18chart

2) The Reserve bank of India choose Business Objects and gives you a proper drilldown kind  of  graph and tables. ( thats a lot of heavy metal and iron ore China needs from India 😉 😉

Foreign Trade – Export      Time-line: ALL

TIME LINE COUNTRY COMMODITY AMOUNT (US $ MILLION) EXPORT QUANTITY
2010:07 (JUL) – P China IRON ORE (Units: TON) 205.06 1878456
2010:06 (JUN) – P China IRON ORE (Units: TON) 427.68 6808528
2010:05 (MAY) – P China IRON ORE (Units: TON) 550.67 5290450
2010:04 (APR) – P China IRON ORE (Units: TON) 922.46 9931500
2010:03 (MAR) – P China IRON ORE (Units: TON) 829.75 13177672
2010:02 (FEB) – P China IRON ORE (Units: TON) 706.04 10141259
2010:01 (JAN) – P China IRON ORE (Units: TON) 577.13 8498784
2009:12 (DEC) – P China IRON ORE (Units: TON) 545.68 9264544
2009:11 (NOV) – P China IRON ORE (Units: TON) 508.17 9509213
2009:10 (OCT) – P China IRON ORE (Units: TON) 422.6 7691652
2009:09 (SEP) – P China IRON ORE (Units: TON) 278.04 4577943
2009:08 (AUG) – P China IRON ORE (Units: TON) 276.96 4371847
2009:07 (JUL) China IRON ORE (Units: TON) 266.11 4642237
2009:06 (JUN) China IRON ORE (Units: TON) 241.08 4584354

Source : DGCI & S, Ministry of Commerce & Industry, GoI

 

You can see the screenshots of the various visualization tools of the New York Fed Reserve Bank and Indian Reserve Bank- if the US Fed is serious about cutting the debt maybe it should start publishing better visuals

LibreOffice Beta 2 (Office Fork off Oracle) launches!

 

Windows 7, the latest client version in the Mi...
Image via Wikipedia

 

Announcement from Code Ninjas at Document Foundation

10 years after the StarOffice code has been opened as OpenOffice.org, The Document Foundation is proud to announce the availability of LibreOffice Beta 2 for public testing. Please, download the suitable package(s) from

http://www.documentfoundation.org/download/

 

Ajay- Note that first beta was downloaded almost 100,000 times

install them, and start testing! Should you find bugs, please report them to the FreeDesktop Bugzilla:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org

If you want to get involved in this exciting project, you can contribute code:

http://www.documentfoundation.org/develop/

translate LibreOffice to your language:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/LibreOffice/i18n/translating_3.3

or just donate:

http://www.documentfoundation.org/contribution/
A list of known issues with Beta 2 is available in our wiki:

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Beta2

Beta Release Notes

This beta release is not intended for production use!

There are a number of known issues being worked on:

  • The Windows build is an International build – you can choose the user interface language that is suitable for you, but the help is always English. We are currently working on improving the delivery mechanism to be able to provide you with the localized help. We are also working on smaller problems like wrong description of several languages.
  • The Linux and MacOSX builds are English builds with the possibility to install language packs. Please browse the archives to get the langugage pack you need for your platform.
  • The LibreOffice branding and renaming is new and work in progress. You may still see old graphics, icons or websites. So please bear with us. This also applies to the BrOffice.org branding – applicable in Brazil.
  • Filters for the legacy StarOffice binary formats are missing.

I tested it- it seems okay enough. Once again Open Source tends to underplay expectations (when was the last time you saw that in enterprise software?)