One of the main indicator of the financial crisis is the TED Spread. Erik Saltwell has created an iGoogle gadget that displays this information as shown below:

iGoogle via kwout

The Gadget might be found here.

A more complete explanation of TED Spread is available on this Reuters Blog post. The gist of the explanation is:

When the TED spread increases it is a sign that lenders believe the
risk of default on interbank loans is increasing. Interbank lenders
therefore demand a higher rate of interest, or accept lower returns on
safe investments such as T-bills. When the risk of banks defaults is
considered to be decreasing, the TED spread decreases.

A few months ago, I came across the optical illusion below  on Mighty Optical Illusion. It is possible to see the lady spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise:

 Then last week an Australian newspaper posted an article that states this optical illusion can be used as a Right brain VS Left Brain test:

THE Right Brain vs Left Brain test … do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?

If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.

Most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it.

Wink is an amazing tool to make tutorial. There are 2 tutorials provided with the software. They are useful to start using the software. So initially, you must spend about 1h to figure out how to use the tool properly. The purpose of this tutorial is not to replace those delivered with the product, but to provide a reminder to those who don’t use the tool very often (like me).

• Once we start wink the following window is displayed. We must start a new project to begin to use the software:

• Then we must choose what to capture: it can be the full screen, a window, etc. We will select the window option. Then we must click the choose button to select the window to capture. Once the window is choosen a green border is displayed around it as shown below:

• The next step is to minimize wink (click the button minimize to tray on shown on the picture below). The important information for capture is in this window. If we want to take a snapshot, we hit the pause key. And if we want to capture an input driven operation, we use alt-pause to start/stop the capture process :

• Once the application is minimized, the wink icon is shown in the tray:

• Use pause to take snapshot, or alt-pause to capture input-driven sequences
• Once finished select finish capture on the menu given by the wink menu on the tray:

• The wink interface is displayed with 3 area: screen area showing the capture screen, the thumbnail area at the bottom, and the tool area at the left that will be use to create the tutorial:

• Use the tool area to add textarea explanation and navigation arrow:

• Once finished, we must render the project, clicking on
• Then to complete our work and view the flash animation we click on