Some amateur gamers have gained huge audiences through streaming sites like Twitch, just as they have on other forms of media. YouTube “vloggers”, often confessional and endearingly personal, are becoming celebrities in their own right. A gaming-related subgenre of video blogs, “Let’s play”, is persistently popular on YouTube. The videos of one “Let’s play” broadcaster, Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, are alone estimated to bring in advertising revenues of up to $16m a year, according to SocialBlade, an analytics firm.
Read more at the Economist
Saturday, September 13
Friday, September 12
Reading higher among millennials
More millennials read books than their elders, a new Pew Research report finds. According to the report, 88% of Americans 16 to 29 years old have read at least one book in the past year, compared with 79% of people 30 and older.
Read the story in the LA Times
Read the story in the LA Times
Sunday, September 7
Where gadgets go to die
A growing mountain of electronic waste needs to be disposed of responsibly by rich nations rather than shipped to poorer countries to do the dirty work.
According to a United Nations initiative known as StEP (Solving the E-Waste Problem), electronic waste can contain up to 60 elements from the periodic table, as well as flame retardants and other nasty chemicals. Apart from heavy metals such as lead and mercury, there are quantities of arsenic, beryllium, cadmium and polyvinyl chloride.
What little is known about recycling hazardous waste in America, for instance, suggests that only 15-20% is actually recycled; the rest gets incinerated or buried in landfills, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). There is no evidence to suggest other countries are any better.
Recycling in an environmentally sound manner is expensive. For wealthier countries it remains much cheaper to ship unwanted electronic goods to poorer parts of the planet.
An interactive map giving details of certified recyclers is on the EPA’s website--www.epa.gov/epawaste.
According to a United Nations initiative known as StEP (Solving the E-Waste Problem), electronic waste can contain up to 60 elements from the periodic table, as well as flame retardants and other nasty chemicals. Apart from heavy metals such as lead and mercury, there are quantities of arsenic, beryllium, cadmium and polyvinyl chloride.
What little is known about recycling hazardous waste in America, for instance, suggests that only 15-20% is actually recycled; the rest gets incinerated or buried in landfills, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). There is no evidence to suggest other countries are any better.
Recycling in an environmentally sound manner is expensive. For wealthier countries it remains much cheaper to ship unwanted electronic goods to poorer parts of the planet.
An interactive map giving details of certified recyclers is on the EPA’s website--www.epa.gov/epawaste.
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