International issues often seem very far away. Yet amazing and groundbreaking things are happening… such as the following.

Mike Fay flew over Africa at 500 feet and took 92,000 pictures. My friend Michael the pilot and film school student told me about this.

Fay wants to convince policy makers to invest in natural resource management for the promotion of peace. Sounds odd? Perhaps not. He alleges that Darfur, Rwanda, and many other troubled areas in Africa have resource depletion as a hidden cause. Would convservation help preserve peace and prevent human rights abuses? Read the article here, or watch the really, really good and short video here.

I like to look a bit more in what he has done. And how he arrived at this incredibly fascinating position in life.

“Fay drummed up support from various sources—the Human Footprint lab at WCS, the WILD Foundation, the Bateleurs (an Africa-based organization of bush pilots volunteering for conservation), and, as chief financial sponsor, the National Geographic Society.”

I find it interesting who he got involved… and the varied life stories of the people behind; the pilot slash optometrist and the Mario Scherer pilot slash Kosovo war crimes investegator.

“Fay arranged collaborations wherever possible with local conservationists, field scientists, or national agencies, assisting them with their aerial-survey needs as well as adding data to his own comprehensive trove.”

In order to be successful anywhere, you must arrange collaborations.

He also used some awesome technological mashups such as geotagging the photos, saving them to a tree terabyte drive on the plane, and using a Tablet PC to annotate them during the flight.

Post your comments on what you think about this guy, his political ambitions, or the breathtaking pictures/videos.

And please, take a few seconds to look at the video.

Here’s last week recapped by Vanguard’s Economic Week in Review.

This includes:

• Real GDP figures for the first quarter
• An uptick in new home sales, with declining existing sales
• A decline in durable goods orders
• And more, all in under 6 minutes!

Click the play button below to listen instantly:
2Mb

The catchy intro and outro music (Immolation) is courtesy of Incompetech and has a Creative Commons license.

Vanguard has an excellent economic week in review news service. I am creating a blog to discipline myself into staying more up to date with investing, business, economics, and technology topics (and serve you, my listeners!) Vanguard has RSS feeds so you can automatically get the latest weeks’ updates.

This week I’ve read the May 15-19 “Economic Week in Review.” Click the audio player below to listen, or subscribe to my podcast.

Check back every week as I post the happenings in the economics world. If you are an investor, you owe it to yourself to study economics.

I am a software developer who’s invested in the markets since I was 12 years old. I find economics, finance, technology, investing, fascinating and by publishing to this blog, I hope to meet other like minded people and become a better investor, entrepreneur, and business person.
My goals for this blog are as follows:

1. Provide aggregated, useful information to investors, technologists, business people and other professionals.
2. Provide you regular postings of interesting finance and economics related insights.
3. Teach economics principles and the benefits of open markets.
4. Highlight interesting fringe areas of economics, such as microfinance, economically tied social issues, and social entrepreneurship.

Topics I plan to cover:

1. Economics as it relates practically to investments
2. Technology as it relates to software developers’ careers
3. Trends as they provide business opportunities and spark innovation
4. Globilization and its ramifications to all nations
5. Inequity and social (in)justice in developing nations

You can see this has a focus in international, technology, and economics topics. I look foward to any feedback, please email talk (at) econtechblog.com