This is the Google Street View “car” for Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada
It’s called the Trekker. They use it to map places where cars can’t reach… Iqaluit only receives a few ships every summer capable of off-loading vehicles. And that space is extremely expensive and very valuable to the community. So realistically, Google probably couldn’t get a Streetview Car out there.
(via reddit)
Like nails sticking out of would-be construction sites, China’s so-called ‘nail houses’ remain standing as long as their owners refuse to make way for development—sometimes becoming symbols of resistance. (via WSJ.com)
"Most Web pages can be connected in 19 clicks or less, thanks to search engines, large aggregators and social networking sites, according to a paper on network science by Hungarian physicist Albert-László Barabási. As the Smithsonian magazine reported, these sites act as hubs for the Web at large — or, as Smithsonian’s Joseph Stromberg puts it, the “Kevin Bacons” of the Web."
How hard is it to disconnect a country from the Internet, really?
The key to the Internet’s survival is the Internet’s decentralization — and it’s not uniform across the world…. Here’s a map of the world, with countries colored according to the Internet diversity at the international frontier.
The most educated countries in the world
In more developed countries, the percentage of adults with the equivalent of a college degree rose to more than 30 percent in 2010. In the United States, it was more than 40 percent, which is among the highest percentages in the world.
1. Canada
- Percent population with tertiary education: 51 percent
- GDP per capita: $39,050 (11th highest)
2. Israel
- Percent population with tertiary education: 46 percent
- GDP per capita: $26,531 (13th lowest)
3. Japan
- Percent population with tertiary education: 45 percent percent (10th lowest)
- GDP per capita: $33,785 (18th highest)
4. United States
- Percent population with tertiary education: 42 percent
- GDP per capita: $46,548 (4th highest)
5. New Zealand
- Percent population with tertiary education: 41 percent
- GDP per capita: $29,711 (17th lowest)
(Report by the OECD)
China’s newest tourist attraction… a glass-bottomed walkway around a cliff face
On one side a sheer rock face, on the other a 4,000ft drop - and all to separate the brave traveller from a deadly plunge is a 3ft-wide, 2.5in thick walkway. Tianmen Mountain in Zhangjiajie, China.
A Gargantuan Map Of The Internet: 196 COUNTRIES. 350,000 SITES. 2,000,000 LINKS. 1 GIANT PICTURE.
In the end, Enikeev created a snapshot of the Internet in 2011, when Google and Facebook ruled the roost—a point clear in their sheer enormity, and their position in the center of the universe, serving as an associative glue across the web… When you couple this association with the country-specific color-coding, you see that China (yellow) and the US (blue) are in a clash of control of the Internet, with Russia (red) and Japan (purple) hanging around the periphery.
A World With More Phones Than People
A new report from the World Bank details the astounding growth of mobile since the year 2000. Then — just 12 years ago — there were less than a billion mobile subscriptions worldwide. Today, there are more than 6 billion and the count will “will soon exceed that of the human population,” according to the Bank (it is common in many countries for one person to own multiple SIM cards). Three-quarters of the world population now has access to a mobile phone.
Even at the height of landline subscriptions there were “only” about one billion globally, and it took more than a century to get there.
Fat Humans Are The Equivalent Of An Extra Half Billion People On Earth
North America has just 6% of the planet’s population, but 34% of its biomass comes from obesity. For some perspective, Asia has 61% of the world’s population and just 13% of biomass from obesity.
What happens when you give Kindles to kids in Ghana? Results:
- Kids learned to use e-readers quickly even though 43 percent of them had never used a computer before. Also, not surprisingly, they were quick to discover “the multimedia aspects of the e-reader, such as music and Internet features.”
- Near-zero theft. Only two e-readers (out of 600) were lost in the whole study, partly because “community involvement was encouraged through e-reader pledges, community outreach programs, and support from community leaders.”
- Kids got access to way more books. Before the study, primary-school students had access to an average of 3.6 books at home. Junior-high students had access to an average of 8.6 books at home and high-school students access to an average of 11 books. With the e-reader program, kids had access to an average of 107 book.
- Primary school students’ test scores improved, but effects on older kids were less clear. The reading scores of primary-school students who received e-readers increased from 12.9 percent to 15.7 percent. But results for older kids were mixed.
- Students sought out access to international news. “Amazon data revealed that students were downloading The New York Times, USA Today, and El País etc., demonstrating that students want to access a wide range of reading materials that were previously inaccessible.”
- Kindles break too easily. Worldreader had not predicted how many Kindles would break: 243 out of 600, or 40.5 percent.
- The program appears cost-effective. Worldreader estimates that “for the years 2014-2018, using a calculation focused strictly on the provisioning of textbooks, the e-reader system would cost only $8.93-$11.40 more per student over a 4 year period [$0.19 to $0.24 per month] than the traditional paper book system.”
