Humans have been sketching maps for millennia, but Claudius Ptolemy was the first to use math and geometry to develop a manual for how to map the planet using a rectangle and intersecting lines—one that resurfaced in 13th-century Byzantium and was used until the early 17th century. Read Here – The Atlantic
With 2013 approaching termination, it may be a good time to review the five most portentous events and developments of the year. Read Here – The National Interest
Silvio Berlusconi is out and Angela Merkel was reelected. Nelson Mandela and Hugo Chavez passed away. Fidel Castro didn’t. People took to the streets in Kiev and Bangkok, Cairo and Khartoum. The president of Syria ignored Barack Obama’s red line and used chemical weapons, while Iran was willing to engage in negotiations with the United […]
Contrary to what environmentalists, anti-globalisation campaigners and other economic curmudgeons like to think, the world is not going to hell in a handbasket, writes Allister Heath Read Here – The Telegraph, London
We live in a world where no single country or group of countries can provide dominant, sustainable global leadership—G-Zero, as I call it—and that’s in large part because so many countries lack solid leadership at home, writes Ian Bremmer. Read Here – Reuters
“Capitalism in Question” sounds like a consciousness-raising session from Occupy Wall Street. But it also happens to be the theme of this year’s annual meeting of the Academy of Management, an association of management professors with more than 19,000 members in over 100 countries. Read Here – Businessweek
The protests have many different origins. In Brazil people rose up against bus fares, in Turkey against a building project. Indonesians have rejected higher fuel prices, Bulgarians the government’s cronyism. In the euro zone they march against austerity, and the Arab spring has become a perma-protest against pretty much everything. Each angry demonstration is angry […]
More than one billion people lack access to clean drinking water, sufficient food and electricity. Meanwhile, the global population is growing by some 80 million people every year. By 2030, the nine billion people living on earth will need 30% more water, 40% more energy and 50% more food to survive. Read Here – Knowledge@Wharton
Pundits and the press too often treat terrorism and guerrilla tactics as something new, a departure from old-fashioned ways of war. But nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout most of our species’ long and bloody slog, warfare has primarily been carried out by bands of loosely organized, ill-disciplined, and lightly armed volunteers who […]
No decade in history has experienced such an increase in urban population as the last. From Tokyo-Yokohama, the world’s largest urban area (population: 37 million) to Godegård, Sweden, which may be the smallest (population: 200), urban areas added 700 million people between 2000 and 2010. Nearly one in 10 of the world’s new urban residents were in […]
looking beyond borders 