(via Arthur Magazine)
Tagglobal
Almost one-third of the world’s people don’t get enough iodine from food and water. The result in extreme cases is large goiters that swell their necks, or other obvious impairments such as dwarfism or cretinism. But far more common is mental slowness.
When a pregnant woman doesn’t have enough iodine in her body, her child may suffer irreversible brain damage and could have an I.Q. that is 10 to 15 points lower than it would otherwise be. An educated guess is that iodine deficiency results in a needless loss of more than 1 billion I.Q. points around the world. […]
“Probably no other technology,” the World Bank said of micronutrients, “offers as large an opportunity to improve lives … at such low cost and in such a short time.”
Yet the strategy hasn’t been fully put in place, partly because micronutrients have zero glamour. There are no starlets embracing iodine. And guess which country has taken the lead in this area by sponsoring the Micronutrient Initiative? Hint: It’s earnest and dull, just like micronutrients themselves.
Ta-da — Canada!
(Thanks Justin)
The decline in U.S. manufacturing deepened in December as demand for such products as cars, appliances and furniture reached the lowest level since at least 1948, signaling further cutbacks in factory jobs and production this year.
The Institute for Supply Management’s factory index fell to 32.4, below economists’ forecasts and the lowest level since 1980, from 36.2 the prior month. Readings less than 50 signal contraction. The group’s new-orders measure reached the lowest level on record and prices slid the most since 1949.
(via Cryptogon)
The ruble has fallen 19 percent against the basket since Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August, to 34.8216. That five-day war, the global credit squeeze and plunging oil prices have led investors to pull more than $200 billion out of Russian investments in the last five months, according to BNP Paribas SA.
“A large part of the government’s revenues, such as oil and gas export duties and extraction taxes, is dollar-denominated, so the ruble weakening certainly helps both the budget and income statements of the oil and gas producers,” said Ronald Smith, head of research at Alfa Bank in Moscow.
(via Cryptogon)
Global oil demand will collapse next year and commodities will not return to the highs they reached this summer in the foreseeable future, two authoritative reports said on Tuesday as they forecast a long and painful worldwide recession.
The stark conclusions came as the World Bank’s chief economist predicted that the world faced “the worst recession since the Great Depression”. […]
Meanwhile, the World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects report said the commodities boom of the past five years – which drove up prices 130 per cent – had “come to an end”.
The World Bank’s analysis of the commodities boom contrasts with the prevalent view among natural resources companies – and most Wall Street analysts – that the ongoing price drop is a correction within an upward trend.
Although it ruled out a return to the torrid high prices of this summer, it said commodities prices would not fall back to the depressed levels of the 1990s.
Oil would return to about $75 a barrel within the next three years, it said, while food would trade 60 per cent higher than in 2003, but about half below this year’s record.
structure built out of usaid food bags
My presentation from CyborgCamp:
Compared to many parts of the world, in the west we’re already living in the singularity.
We can help people in the developing world with technology, and we can learn new things from the problems of the developing world.
A State Department division that runs public diplomacy programs overseas could prove to be a model to its peers with its use of business intelligence software, popular with the private sector, to demonstrate the return on investment of its expenditures. Its latest project is a pilot program to develop algorithms that better show correlations between the department’s goals and its expenditures, using SAP Business Objects Planning XI software.
The State Department last year spent $357 million on diplomacy programs designed to create a positive image of the United States in other parts of the world. These include summer camp programs for kids in the Middle East, the American Corners information libraries at various U.S. embassies, and speaking engagements by American celebrities.
Government Using BI Software To Measure Public Diplomacy — Government Business Intelligence.
Last week, Danish Computerworld awarded IT Factory
, a provider of CRM, HRM and Business Intelligence add-on solutions based on a SaaS delivery model, with the prestigious “Denmark’s Best IT-company 2008?. This week, the company has been declared bankrupt and its managing director Stein Bagger went missing in Dubai while under scrutiny by the police
.The remarkable story is all over the Danish press but has remained largely unnoticed outside of the country so far.
Stein Bagger apparently got his hands really dirty: he’s wanted by the Danish police
for financial fraud and a possible link to an assault on a business man (reportedly executed by members of the Hell’s Angels, a group he was connected to somehow), although charges haven’t been pressed so far. Nobody has seen Bagger since last Thursday, when he disappeared somewhere in Dubai, where he was attending a business conference in the company of his wife and child (his wife is also the one who reported his disappearance).
The reason I opened this with the Nick Douglas joke — aside from the fact I thought it was funny — is the fact that all of the best content from the Superstruct project grew outside the original petri dish. Most of the best brainfood wound up growing on the Tumblr platform, which makes sense…I would especially recommend The Gupta Option.
In fact, the Superstruct information works so much better on other platforms, I’m kind of confused why they’d take the time to code up a clunky site in the first place. Check out the Reconstruct Ning page — it handles every aspect of usability and information design better than the actual site. Much like the Obama campaign, the best thing to come out of Superstruct is the community that it created. To me, that’s awesome enough to still give Jane McGonigal, Jamais Cascio and the rest of the folks at IFTF credit for a job well done.
Superstruct Review: Unplayable, Unwinnable, Still Awesome // Skilluminati Research.
South Korean firm Daewoo has unveiled plans to plant corn on one million acres of land in Madagascar, to sharply cut its reliance on US imports.
Daewoo is leasing the vast tract of land – half the size of Belgium – for 99 years and hopes to produce 5 million tonnes of corn a year by 2023.
It will use South African expertise and local labour on the plantations.
Asian countries have been trying to ensure access to food supplies after grain prices soared earlier this year.
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