About Miguel Paz

Nieman-Berkman Fellow. Founder @Poderomedia @Poderopedia. @HacksHackersSCL organizer. Alumni @ICFJKnightFellow, @Knightfdn #NewsChallenge @StartupChile @ElMostrador.

MIT Financial Explorer: Opening the Brown Book data for everyone

MIT Finance Explorer

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Brown Book is the “annual report of sponsored research activities” for MIT Campus and Lincoln Lab (a federally funded research and development center of technology for national security). While the Brown Book is published on a regular basis, with details about the millions of dollars in funds provided by major sponsors such as the Air Force or Shell; and expenditures by MIT Schools and Centers, it is not well known by academics, staff, students or citizens of Cambridge. Nor it is available in a format that is easy to understand by people who are not subject experts. Which are MIT`s top money receivers? Who are the top donors? How much funds does a Center receive and for what? What companies and government organizations are the major sponsors of grants and contracts? The MIT Financial Explorer is a project developed by Austin Hess, Michael Greshko and Miguel Paz. It aims to give you answers about the financial structure of MIT and release all the data in a friendly format so you can reuse it for your own projects and amusement. Please enter here.

How and why The Economist`s “Latino” Chili Peppers cover got Hispanic Americans “fired up”

I reported on the debate over Twitter about The Economist`s latest cover story and the concept used by the publication to talk about Latinos.

LATINO-PEPPERS-COVER-

 

The debate ranges between healthy criticism to some opportunism as news organizations that picked up the issue, just focus on the red peppers and not about the story. It is also interesting to see – and this is a opinion based on perception not fact – how the same cover seems to be interpreted differently in the US (very PC) and outside the country (not so PC). Unfortunately I did not have access to geolocated data to review in detail.

I used Fold for this (got a beta access yesterday). The story It`s still not publicly available. But I can show it in class.

Experimenting with Fold