Watching the World

“A staggering 60 per cent of the world’s population now [have] a cellphone subscription . . . It’s a massive change from just six years ago, when less than 15 per cent had cell access.”​—MACLEAN’S, CANADA.

Over the last decade, 1,068 new species have been discovered in the greater Mekong region of Southeast Asia.​—WORLD WILDLIFE FUND, UNITED STATES.

“America has less than 5% of the world’s people but almost 25% of its prisoners. It imprisons 756 people per 100,000 residents, a rate nearly five times the world average.”​—THE ECONOMIST, BRITAIN.

“Distraction Overload”

Some forms of high-tech communication can hinder concentration on other tasks. Experts who study human-machine interactions​—things like instant messaging, calendar reminders, e-mail alerts, and computer pop-ups—​report that the wired world suffers from “distraction overload and continuous partial attention.” The result of a succession of interruptions may be that “you risk never focusing exclusively on any thought or perception for long and never being able to work straight through to completion on anything,” says Newsweek magazine. Among other things, such distractions can cause “memory loss” and “decreased memory accuracy” as well as potentially disastrous errors.

Need for Interpreters

Courts, law-enforcement agencies, hospitals, and other service providers in the United States are often in need of help to understand what people are saying. On-demand interpreting services are filling the need to communicate in what a Reuters news report calls “an increasingly polyglot world.” One California-based company employs 5,200 interpreters who speak 176 languages​—from the relatively common, such as Chinese, Russian, and Spanish, to the more obscure, such as languages spoken in parts of Africa and Mexico. In less than a minute, such companies can “evaluate what language the individual speaks” and put an interpreter on the line to help clients “get people talking,” says the report.

Unexpected Source of Gold

Nagano Prefecture, northwest of Tokyo, has “discovered a new source of mineral wealth​—sewage,” says a Reuters news report from Japan. Analysis revealed that the ash from incinerated sewage sludge processed at the Suwa treatment plant contained a percentage of gold much higher than the ore extracted from Japan’s richest gold mines. The prefecture expects to receive 15 million yen, over $167,000, for the gold in just one fiscal year. It is thought that the high concentrations of gold in the sewage are “due to the large number of precision equipment manufacturers in the vicinity that use the yellow metal,” says the report.