Center for International Development, Harvard | Cambridge, MA | ONSITE | Full-time
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* UX Designer * Web and Data Developers  * Web Development INTERNS
What we do:
We take real world government data and research, and turn them into interactive data viz tools. The Atlas of Economic Complexity is our current online tool that lets you interactively visualize a country’s trade and explore growth opportunities for more than a hundred countries worldwide. Last year we launched a Mexican Atlas <a href=" which allows users to explore data and understand policy effects at regional and local levels. This year we are launching similar tools in Colombia and Peru.
Our stack:
We use python, django, mysql (hopefully postgres soon), elasticsearch, ansible for the back end. For the frontend, it's ember / d3 on the country projects, jquery/d3 on atlas.cid.harvard.edu/ and WebGL with Three.js on some 3d projects that we’ve launched such as globe.cid.harvard.edu/ Everything we do is open source: <a href="
Demo of the current atlas:
An example of how the atlas is useful take this story here: <a href="
Recently the EU placed sanctions on sales of oil equipment, but not on oil imports. Why could this be? Almost 70% of russia's exports are petrol products: <a href="
And Russia exports the overwhelming majority of its petroleum products to Europe:
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The big blue chunk is europe, meaning a sanction would really hurt Russia. However, when you look at who else the EU could buy from, the situation is grim: <a href="
There’s practically no one who’s a real political ally that Europe could depend on, save for Norway. It’s interesting how it’s practically impossible to buy oil from a country that’s relatively stable and doing well on the HDI front.
It’s worse if you consider the cost of transporting it, and how close Russia is:
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Which probably explains why EU hasn't placed sanctions on oil imports from Russia.
Think you could design/build/use this better? We think you can too!
Get in touch:Send us some work you're proud of to greg_shapiro at hks dot harvard dot edu.