That blue curve --> A new era in government accountability?.. tomara que sim..

~1opmish on a weekday, at home... the TV is on, tuned in bloomberg TV

Brazil's new minister of economy was in New York that very same day, and while I wasn't looking at the screen, he says in portuguese

~"and you can see that the inflation expected by analysts for the next 12 months is slighly below the target... i'm talking about the blue curve in the chart"

what blue curve? the TV wasn't of any help.. they weren't even showing the powerpoint slides... so why not dreaming? why not trying www.fazenda.com.br?

AND THERE IT WAS!! his presentation from the very same day, slide #8 .. market expectation just below the target. that was delightful, really more than expected!!

is that the world that is waiting for a baby born in 2006? cleaner government-to-citizen communication, more transparency on public data? it would be really nice!!

hopefully he/she can hope to be president one day in the future.. and role model accountability in 21st century governments ;-)

Vertical mobility (at hyperspeed)...

One of the ultimate engines that drive [capitalist?] societies is vertical mobility (moving up the ladder of social and economic status).
tudying hard, and working hard to ensure that you end up Living better than your parents did. Isn't that engrained in almost everybody?, hasn't it driven many parents to invest heavily on the education of their children? hasn't that idea conquered many readers for Horatio Alger novels?

I look at it as the convection in a lava lamp, generating a constant change from bottom to top (and a short stay at the top).

And is the speed increasing? as globalization drives the capitalism dream of getting to the top fast, sometimes even challenging the importance of education, experience and certainly requiring less and less investment capital in every iteration. Empires are built overnight on top of a winning idea, and even the recently established empires seem challenged by the newcomers.

MySpace.com and Youtube.com are rising at an amazing speed in the rank of the top sites with most traffic in the Internet, and one year ago they barely were a blip in the radar. Even when comparing traffic with the much-more-commented video.google.com, youtube as a pure-play video sharing service already has about 3 times as many users.

Can that lava-lamp effect illustrate the changes in the top 100 ranked sites in alexa.org over time? is temperature increasing? do we have a taller lamp? and what would it take for a specific bubble to stay in the top? (probably the unrealistic expectation of a company to keep recruiting and retaining the very best brains in the planet.. quite unlikely!).