Recently, the New York Times featured a bubble chart of the proposed budget for 2013 by Shan Carter . It features some nice, organic, animations, and smooth transitions that add a lot of visual appeal to the graphic. This was all done using D3.js .

As FlowingData commenters point out , the use of bubbles may or may not be the best way to display this dataset. Still, the way this visualization draws you in and gets you to interact makes it a nice piece and one that makes you wonder how they did it.

In this post, we attempt to tease out some of the details of how this graphic works.

On a conference call with investors last month, billionaire John Paulson boasted that one of his biggest hedge funds would have been up 15 percent this year -- if only he hadn’t owned gold stocks.

The wishful computation of returns highlights the challenge for Paulson as he seeks to resurrect his reputation as a Wall Street icon and reverse $9.4 billion in losses for clients in the past two years. Paulson has done well investing in companies undergoing mergers or restructurings, a strategy where he got his start as trader. Yet his big bets on macroeconomic developments, such as his wager on gold, have undermined that performance.

Ever since he made $15 billion in 2007 for investors by predicting the tumble in the U.S. housing market, Paulson has stumbled from one losing macro trade to another, chipping away at gains that are still among the largest in hedge-fund history. He has been too optimistic about the U.S. economic recovery and overly bearish about the European debt crisis. Gold, which Paulson forecast would strengthen as investors sought a hedge against inflation, instead entered a bear market this year.

Once one of the world’s biggest hedge funds, New York-based Paulson & Co.’s assets have slid more than 50 percent from a peak of $38 billion in 2011. His $500 million Gold Fund, most of it Paulson’s own money, lost 27 percent last month, bringing the decline this year to 47 percent, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Paulson started his foray into gold in early 2009, betting that bullion would rise as governments printed money to revive their economies following the 2008 financial crisis. Paulson took a $1.3 billion stake in AngloGold Ashanti Ltd. and $2.8 billion of a gold exchange-traded fund when the metal was trading around $950 an ounce. He was the biggest holder of both at the end of last year, the most recent figures available.

While gold is still trading more than 50 percent higher than when he started investing in the metal, it has tumbled about 25 percent from a record in 2011 even as central banks from Tokyo to Washington extended asset purchases to bolster their economies.

Since late 2012, Paulson has emphasized to clients his firm’s strength in investments that aim to profit from takeovers, restructurings and spinoffs. The firm’s new website, started last week, portrays Paulson & Co. as a bottom-up, event- driven arbitrage firm that seeks capital preservation and above- average returns, without mentioning gold.

‘Event-Focused’

“All of our strategies are event-focused across mergers, bankruptcies, spinoffs, recapitalizations and other corporate events,” Paulson & Co. said in an e-mailed statement. “The firm is one of the largest players in merger situations, as well as in bankruptcy reorganizations in the most recent cycle.”

Hiring Greenspan

Paulson, who hadn’t made gold investments on that scale before, brought in experts to help him. Victor Flores, a senior mining analyst at HSBC Holdings Plc, joined in November 2009. John Reade, a former mining engineer who was UBS AG’s head of metals strategy, started two months later.
A few years earlier, Paulson hired Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Chairman whose last years at the central bank coincided with the formation of the housing bubble, as an economic adviser.
While Greenspan was a gold bug, not all of Paulson’s advisers shared that view. Harvard professor Martin Feldstein, who joined Paulson’s economic advisory board less than two years ago, had previously argued that gold historically hasn’t worked well as a hedge against inflation or a declining dollar.

Feldstein’s View

“Gold is a purely speculative investment. Over the next few years, it may fall to $500 an ounce or rise to $2,000 an
ounce,” Feldstein wrote in a paper in 2009, the year Paulson started betting on gold on a large scale. “There is no way to know which it will be. Caveat emptor.”

more: http://www.paulsonco.com/

Out in Silicon Valley, the last bastion of full employment, the Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerbergs of the future are staying up all night writing code in dorms.

While California faces one of the worst budget crises in its history and national employment numbers remain stagnant, venture capitalists stalk the campuses of Stanford and Caltech, looking for fertile ideas on which to sprinkle dollars.

How the Irish media are partly to blame for the catastrophic property bubble, from a paper entitled _The Role Of The Media In Propping Up Ireland’s Housing Bubble_, by Dr Julien Mercille, in the _Social Europe Journal_:

“The overall argument is that the Irish media are part and parcel of the political and corporate establishment, and as such the news they convey tend to reflect those sectors’ interests and views. In particular, the Celtic Tiger years involved the financialisation of the economy and a large property bubble, all of it wrapped in an implicit neoliberal ideology. The media, embedded within this particular political economy and itself a constitutive element of it, thus mostly presented stories sustaining it. In particular, news organisations acquired direct stakes in an inflated real estate market by purchasing property websites and receiving vital advertising revenue from the real estate sector. Moreover, a number of their board members were current or former high officials in the finance industry and government, including banks deeply involved in the bubble’s expansion."

FASCINATING read: Analysis juxtaposes 19th century Britain w 21st century USA

This year, Soros spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos. "Since hedge funds are now a dominant force in the market, they can't, as a group, outperform the market," he said.

Research from BarclayHedge and TrimTabs Investment Research suggests he is right. In 2012, the hedge fund industry as a whole was up just 7.8%, while the S&P 500 was up 14%.

"There are around 10,000 hedge funds. How many can be right at the same time?" asks McCullough.

* * *

In just two days last week, the 57-year-old hedge fund manager lost almost $1bn as the gold price slumped at a speed unseen in decades. With a personal fortune valued by Forbes magazine at $11.2bn, Paulson can weather the loss, but this is not his first stumble since his historic bet on the property crash made him the world's most famous hedge fund manager.

His funds became money magnets, managing just shy of $36bn at their height. For some, that's where Paulson's problems began: he had become too big not to fail. The funds are now thought to manage around $18bn in total.

Make a Bubble Tube Lamp, April 19, 2013 at 08:45AM, from Hacked Gadgets - DIY Tech Blog http://hackedgadgets.com