There's Big Money to Be Made in Asteroid Mining See the full version of the infographic. If humans were ever able to get their hands on just one asteroid, it would be a game-changer. That’s because the value of many asteroids are measured in the quintillions of dollars, which makes the market for Earth’s annual production of raw metals – about $660 billion per year – look paltry in comparison. The reality is that the Earth’s crust is saddled with uneconomic materials, while certain types of asteroids are almost pure metal. X-type asteroids, for example, are thought to be the remnants of large asteroids that were pulverized in collisions in which their dense, metallic cores got separated from the mantle. There is one such X-type asteroid near earth that is believed to hold more platinum than ever mined in human history. Near-Earth Mining Targets Both companies are looking specifically at near-Earth asteroids in the near-term, which are the easiest ones to get to. Where the Money is Made
Here's a Helpful Infographic on the Many Risks of Helicopter Parenting Below you'll find a nifty infographic produced by the folks at Yellowbrick detailing the consequences of everyone's favorite irritating childrearing trend: helicopter parenting. We've written a lot about this topic here at Big Think; our archives are a veritable smorgasbord of pieces detailing its effects and consequences. Our focus isn't merely because we like to helicopter the helicopter parents, but because shifts in how we raise our kids have resulted in a generation of young adults who lack critical thinking, self-reliance, and coping skills. And that sucks not just for said young adults, but also for everyone else who has to deal with their problems. The image below will shed some light on all these elements, as well as offer a more basic crash course for those still unfamiliar with this troubling trend: For additional information on and analysis of the items above, check out the Yellowbrick blog.
About Bones You probably don’t give much thought to your skeleton, even though it’s holding you together. Do you have as many bones now as you did when you were born? What’s the shortest bone in your body? When it comes to bone health, Dr. By age 30, we’re already starting to lose bone density if we don’t exercise. Love This? Thanks for subscribing! “Most people don’t realize it when they’re deficient in vitamin D,” Stearns said in an interview with Care2. Check out The Cleveland Clinic infographic below to learn more about the bones that make up your skeleton. According to the National Osteoporosis Foundation, women 50 and younger and men 70 and younger need about 1,000mg of calcium a day. If you’re under age 50, you need 400 to 800 IU of vitamin D a day. Guidelines differ for children, pregnant women and women who are breastfeeding. If you don’t get enough calcium and vitamin D from your diet, talk to your doctor about dietary supplements. Main post photo: Thinkstock | Infographic: Cleveland Clinic
Trump's conflicts of interest: a visual guide | US news Trump's conflicts of interest: a visual guide By Nadja Popovich and Jan Diehm “I will be leaving my great business in total in order to fully focus on running the country in order to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Donald Trump tweeted on Wednesday. The early morning announcement, which provided no further details but promised a press conference on 15 December, followed weeks of bad press over conflicts of interest posed by the Trump Organization’s international real estate dealings. “While I am not mandated to do this under the law,” Trump wrote, “I feel it is visually important, as president, to in no way have a conflict of interest with my various businesses.” So far, the visuals haven’t been good for the president-elect. Closer to home, the business interests of the Trump Organization will cross paths with the US government on multiple fronts, providing ample opportunity for further conflicts. General Services Administration v Trump International Hotel, DC What the President-elect could do
Support for ISIS in the Muslim World - Perceptions vs Reality According to a Brookings report from last January: 40% of Americans believe most Muslims oppose ISIS.14% think most Muslims support ISIS.And 44% (the plurality) of Americans believe Muslim views are evenly balanced on the issue. American perceptions of Muslims’ support for the Islamic State are all over the map. And you only have to search Google for “how many muslims support isis” to see why. The first result shows “81% of respondents support the Islamic State.” The range of answers to this question reported by the media is enormous, partly because much of it comes from online polls, social media sentiment analysis, and other non-scientific / unrepresentative studies. Last month, the International Business Times cited a study from Pew Research Center concluding ISIS is “almost universally hated.” What the Muslim world actually thinks of ISIS Looking only at scientific opinion polls, the results are actually very consistent. In the Muslim world, support for ISIS is low across the board.
How to make infographics: a beginner’s guide to data visualisation | Global Development Professionals Network As a growing number of international NGOs are using infographics, charts and interactive maps to share success and highlight disaster, how can organisations with less resources create high quality visualisations without having to pay to outsource them? We’ve put together a beginner’s guide for visualising development data. Organising your data The first thing you need to do is have a clear idea of the data you want to visualise. Are you trying to highlight a particular disparity between money spent in one place and another? Are you trying to show a volume of activity going on in one location? Let’s imagine I’m running a campaign calling for better sanitation worldwide. While I have data for over 10 years, I just want the figures for 2000 and 2012, so the first thing I need to do is remove any irrelevant columns and rows (tip: save a separate copy of the original first). Before... After... Once you’ve cleaned-up your data, you’re ready to visualise it. How to build a chart How to build a map
What is the World’s Biggest Cash Crop? — Information is Beautiful Yep Cannabis makes serious dough. Curious why so many US states – Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Colorado – have decriminalised or even legalized the drug? Because state legislators are getting high on another kind of green. How long before other cash-strapped governments around the world follow suit? Our methodology We scored some data on yearly harvested area, production weight and wholesale value for the most common food crops from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and used it to calculate yield per km2. Then we went sniffing around in various UN World Drug Reports and performed some backroom calculations to cook up some broadly comparable figures for illegal drugs – cocaine, heroin and the mighty marijuana. Data on illicit substances is, like the peeps who sell them, more than a bit sketchy.
3 Ways Exponential Technologies are Impacting the Future of Learning – SingularityU – Medium Exponential Technologies Impact What Needs to be Learned In a 2013 white paper titled Dancing with Robots: Human Skills for Computerized Work, Richard Murnane and Frank Levy argue that in the computer age, the skills which are valuable in the new labor market are significantly different than what they were several decades ago. Computers are much better than humans at tasks that can be organized into a set of rules-based routines. If a task can be reduced to a series of “if-then-do” statements, then computers or robots are the right ones for the job. However, there are many things that computers are not very good at and should be left to humans, at least for now. 3 Main Things Humans Are Still Better at Robots 1. Humans are significantly more effective when the desired outcome or set of information needed to solve the problem are unknowable in advance. 2. 3. Future-Proof Skill Sets What are these skills exactly? Exponential Technologies Impact How We View Schooling and Society
By 2020, These 10 Employee Skills Will Soon Be In Huge Demand! A new infographic shows that six key factors are driving the change we’re seeing right right now: extreme longevity, the rise of smart machines and systems, our computational world, new media ecology, superstructures organizations and the globally connected world. With these massive issues in play, what will the working landscape look like in five years? What skills will employees need to succeed? I’ll tell you one thing: they look nothing like the skills desired of workers in the industrial revolution, or even in the dot-com era. In 2020, the ability to come up with solutions, ideas and responses will be highly sought after and will propel you to the front of the business line. New media literacy — the ability to critically asses and develop content by utilizing and leveraging new forms of media effectively — will be highly desirable in employees. A design mindset is also going to be key.