Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/279345290?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Friday, January 25, 2013
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Pinterest in the Classroom | RunSoulCycle
What is Pinterest?
In the classroom,? teachers can create pinboards for whatever topics their students are learning. Pinboards on ?Tutorials for Science Projects?, ?Famous Works of Art?, ?1920s Fashion?, or ?Architecture? can all be created and shared. Students can see visual representations and collect these images for future reference inside and outside of the classroom.
Teachers can also create their own pinboards which can highlight classroom set up, instructional tools, motivational quotes, or best practices to share with followers from around the world or keep organized for future reference. As a health and physical education teacher, I have a pinboard for my HPE content area displayed here.
Pinners to Follow:
If you?re new to Pinterest or want some teaching inspiration, consider following these great pinners:
Me!
Ophea
Cindy Merritt
The Physical Educator
Jon Empringham
Allison Cleland
iPhysEd
Pinterest 101:
| Pinteresthttp://www.Pinterest.com/ ? | What it isPhoto sharing and organizing website. Free and can be linked to other social media. ? | In the CurriculumTeachers can set up class boards and pin photos related to the topic. Exemplars for assignments/projects can be pinned and shared. Students can create boards related to a given curricular topic. | Ease of UseSeveral online instructional videos are available. |
Source: http://runsoulcycle.com/2013/01/23/pinterest-in-the-classroom-2/
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Oil prices are still high. Ten reasons that's a problem.
Oil prices are still high, Tverberg writes, and will continue to be so if we expect to have more tight oil and more oil from other unconventional sources. Tverberg offers 10 reasons why high oil prices are a problem.
In this March 2012 file photo, PetroChina oil rigs are seen near the banks of a snow covered lake in northeastern China's Heilongjiang province. New oil sources may help supply somewhat, Tverberg writes, but the high cost of extraction and resulting high oil prices are not likely to go away.
AP/File
EnlargeA person might think from looking at news reports that our oil problems are gone, but?oil prices are still high.
Skip to next paragraph Our Finite WorldGail Tverberg, an actuary with a background in math, analyzes energy and financial matters from a perspective that the world has limited resources. For more of Gail's posts, click?here.
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In fact, the new ?tight oil? sources of oil which are supposed to grow in supply are still expensive to extract. If we expect to have more tight oil and more oil from other unconventional sources, we need to expect to continue to have high oil prices. The new oil may help?supply?somewhat, but the?high cost of extraction?is not likely to go away.
Why are high oil prices a problem?
1. It is not just oil prices that rise.?The cost of food rises as well, partly because oil is used in many ways in growing and transporting food and partly because of the competition from biofuels for land, sending land prices up. The cost of shipping goods of all types rises, since oil is used in nearly all methods of transports. The cost of materials that are made from oil, such as asphalt and chemical products, also rises.?
If the cost of oil rises, it tends to raise the cost of other fossil fuels. The cost of natural gas extraction tends to rises, since oil is used in natural gas drilling and in transporting water for fracking. Because of an over-supply of natural gas in the US, its sales price is temporarily?less than the cost of production. This is not a sustainable situation. Higher oil costs also tend to raise the cost of transporting coal to the destination where it is used.?
Figure 2 shows total energy costs as a percentage of two different bases: GDP and Wages.1?These costs are still near their high point in 2008, relative to these bases. Because oil is the largest source of energy, and the highest priced, it represents the majority of energy costs. GDP is the usual base of comparison, but?I have chosen to show a comparison to wages as well. I do this because even if an increase in costs takes place in the government or business sector of the economy, most of the higher costs will eventually have to be paid for by individuals, through higher taxes or higher prices on goods or services.
2. High oil prices don?t go away, except in recession.
We extracted the easiest (and cheapest) to extract oil first. Even oil company executives say, ?The easy oil is gone.? The oil that is available now tends to be expensive to extract because it is deep under the sea, or near the North Pole, or needs to be ?fracked,? or is thick like paste, and needs to be melted. We haven?t discovered cheaper substitutes, either, even though we have been looking for years.
In fact, there is good reason to believe that the cost of oil extraction will continue to rise faster than the rate of inflation, because we are hitting a situation of ?diminishing returns?. There is evidence that?world oil production costs are increasing at about 9% per year?(7% after backing about the effect of inflation). Oil prices paid by consumers will need to keep pace, if we expect increased extraction to take place. ?There is?even evidence?that sweet sports are extracted first in?Bakken tight oil, causing the cost of this extraction to rise as well.
3. Salaries don?t increase to offset rising oil prices.
Most of us know from personal experience that salaries don?t rise with rising oil prices.
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Tax advice not secret like legal counsel, UK court rules
LONDON (Reuters) - Advice by accountants cannot be kept secret in the same way that legal counsel is confidential, Britain's Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday in a blow to attempts by UK insurer Prudential to keep details of a tax avoidance scheme hidden from the taxman.
The ruling comes at a time when public anger over corporate tax avoidance is running high in Britain and parliamentarians are considering changing the law to make it harder for the likes of Starbucks or Amazon to use inter-company transactions to cut their tax bills.
By a 5-2 majority, judges rejected Prudential's argument that legal advice by qualified professionals like accountants cannot be disclosed without the client's consent, in the same way that discussions with lawyers are protected.
The ruling means that firms will not be able to duck out of producing documents requested by tax inspectors by invoking an ancient right of confidentiality.
The case stemmed from a tax avoidance scheme devised by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in 2004 and adopted by Prudential, which later refused to hand over documents to the taxman on the basis they contained advice from PwC which was protected by legal professional privilege.
Developed over hundreds of years in English common law, the rule of legal professional privilege means that communications between lawyers and their clients are absolutely confidential.
"The consequences of allowing Prudential's appeal are hard to assess and would be likely to lead to what is currently a clear and well understood principle becoming an unclear principle, involving uncertainty," wrote David Neuberger, president of the Supreme Court, in the ruling.
He said the case raised issues of policy which should not be decided by a court but rather by parliament.
Prudential and PwC declined to comment on the ruling.
"Accountants will no doubt think it is unfair, as it will drive clients concerned about maintaining confidentiality in advice provided to them into the welcoming arms of law firms," said Peter Clough, head of disputes at international law firm Osborne Clarke.
The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), the main professional body representing accountants, said the ruling was "disappointing" but not the end of the road.
"The current position is unprincipled and anti-competitive for individuals and businesses who we believe should be able to seek the best professional advice upon the same terms whether from lawyers, accountants or indeed other appropriately qualified professionals," said Michael Izza, chief executive of ICAEW.
"The Supreme Court believes that issues of extending legal advice privilege are a question for parliament ... So for us, the work on getting equal treatment for our clients moves to the political field, rather than the legal courts," he said.
The Law Society, which represents solicitors, said the Supreme Court ruling had protected an important human right of clients.
"A lawyer's duties and responsibilities to the client and to the courts are not available on a pick'n'mix basis," wrote Desmond Hudson, chief executive of the Law Society.
(Editing by David Cowell)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/tax-advice-not-secret-legal-counsel-uk-court-170837117--finance.html
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Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Daily Chronicle | Recession, technology flail middle-class jobs
NEW YORK ? Five years after the start of the Great Recession, the toll is terrifyingly clear: Millions of middle-class jobs have been lost in developed countries the world over.
And the situation is even worse than it appears.
Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market. What?s more, these jobs aren?t just being lost to China and other developing countries, and they aren?t just factory work. Increasingly, jobs are disappearing in the service sector, home to two-thirds of all workers.
They?re being obliterated by technology.
Year after year, the software that runs computers and an array of other machines and devices becomes more sophisticated and powerful and capable of doing tasks more efficiently that humans have always done. For decades, science fiction warned of a future when we would be architects of our own obsolescence, replaced by our machines; an Associated Press analysis finds that the future has arrived.
?The jobs that are going away aren?t coming back,? says Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of ?Race Against the Machine.? ??I have never seen a period where computers demonstrated as many skills and abilities as they have over the past seven years.?
The global economy is being reshaped by machines that generate and analyze vast amounts of data; by devices such as smartphones and tablet computers that let people work just about anywhere, even when they?re on the move; by smarter, nimbler robots; and by services that let businesses rent computing power when they need it, instead of installing expensive equipment and hiring IT staffs to run it. Whole employment categories, from secretaries to travel agents, are starting to disappear.
?There?s no sector of the economy that?s going to get a pass,? says Martin Ford, who runs a software company and wrote ?The Lights in the Tunnel,? a book predicting widespread job losses. ?It?s everywhere.?
The numbers startle even labor economists. In the United States, half of the 7.5 million jobs lost during the Great Recession paid middle-class wages, ranging from $38,000 to $68,000. But only 2 percent of the 3.5 million jobs gained since the recession ended in June 2009 are midpay. Nearly 70 percent are low-paying jobs; 29 percent pay well.
In the 17 European countries that use the euro as their currency, the numbers are even worse. Almost 4.3 million low-pay jobs have been gained since mid-2009, but the loss of midpay jobs has never stopped. A total of 7.6 million disappeared from January 2008 through June.
Experts warn that this ?hollowing out? of the middle-class workforce is far from over. They predict the loss of millions more jobs as technology becomes even more sophisticated and reaches deeper into our lives. Maarten Goos, an economist at the University of Leuven in Belgium, says Europe could double its middle-class job losses.
Some occupations are beneficiaries of the march of technology, such as software engineers and app designers for smartphones and tablet computers. Overall, though, technology is eliminating far more jobs than it is creating.
To understand the impact technology is having on middle-class jobs in developed countries, the AP analyzed employment data from 20 countries; tracked changes in hiring by industry, pay and task; compared job losses and gains during recessions and expansions over the past four decades; and interviewed economists, technology experts, robot manufacturers, software developers, entrepreneurs and people in the labor force who ranged from CEOs to the unemployed.
The AP?s key findings:
?For more than three decades, technology has drastically reduced the number of jobs in manufacturing. Robots and other machines controlled by computer programs work faster and make fewer mistakes than humans. Now, that same efficiency is being unleashed in the service economy, which employs more than two-thirds of the workforce in developed countries. Technology is eliminating jobs in office buildings, retail establishments and other businesses consumers deal with every day.
?Technology is being adopted by every kind of organization that employs people. It?s replacing workers in large corporations and small businesses, established companies and start-ups. It?s being used by schools, colleges and universities; hospitals and other medical facilities; nonprofit organizations and the military.
?The most vulnerable workers are doing repetitive tasks that programmers can write software for ? an accountant checking a list of numbers, an office manager filing forms, a paralegal reviewing documents for key words to help in a case. As software becomes even more sophisticated, victims are expected to include those who juggle tasks, such as supervisors and managers ? workers who thought they were protected by a college degree.
?Thanks to technology, companies in the Standard & Poor?s 500 stock index reported one-third more profit the past year than they earned the year before the Great Recession. They?ve also expanded their businesses, but total employment, at 21.1 million, has declined by a half-million.
?Start-ups account for much of the job growth in developed economies, but software is allowing entrepreneurs to launch businesses with a third fewer employees than in the 1990s. There is less need for administrative support and back-office jobs that handle accounting, payroll and benefits.
?It?s becoming a self-serve world. Instead of relying on someone else in the workplace or our personal lives, we use technology to do tasks ourselves. Some find this frustrating; others like the feeling of control. Either way, this trend will only grow as software permeates our lives.
?Technology is replacing workers in developed countries regardless of their politics, policies and laws. Union rules and labor laws may slow the dismissal of employees, but no country is attempting to prohibit organizations from using technology that allows them to operate more efficiently ? and with fewer employees.
Some analysts reject the idea that technology has been a big job killer. They note that the collapse of the housing market in the U.S., Ireland, Spain and other countries and the ensuing global recession wiped out millions of middle-class construction and factory jobs. In their view, governments could bring many of the jobs back if they would put aside worries about their heavy debts and spend more. Others note that jobs continue to be lost to China, India and other countries in the developing world.
But to the extent technology has played a role, it raises the specter of high unemployment even after economic growth accelerates. Some economists say millions of middle-class workers must be retrained to do other jobs if they hope to get work again. Others are more hopeful. They note that technological change over the centuries eventually has created more jobs than it destroyed, though the wait can be long and painful.
A common refrain: The developed world may face years of high middle-class unemployment, social discord, divisive politics, falling living standards and dashed hopes.
In the U.S., the economic recovery that started in June 2009 has been called the third straight ?jobless recovery.?
But that?s a misnomer. The jobs came back after the first two.
Most recessions since World War II were followed by a surge in new jobs as consumers started spending again and companies hired to meet the new demand. In the months after recessions ended in 1991 and 2001, there was no familiar snap-back, but all the jobs had returned in less than three years.
But 42 months after the Great Recession ended, the U.S. has gained only 3.5 million, or 47 percent, of the 7.5 million jobs that were lost. The 17 countries that use the euro had 3.5 million fewer jobs last June than in December 2007.
This has truly been a jobless recovery, and the lack of midpay jobs is almost entirely to blame.
Fifty percent of the U.S. jobs lost were in midpay industries, but Moody?s Analytics, a research firm, says just 2 percent of the 3.5 million jobs gained are in that category. After the four previous recessions, at least 30 percent of jobs created ? and as many as 46 percent ? were in midpay industries.
Other studies that group jobs differently show a similar drop in middle-class work.
Some of the most startling studies have focused on midskill, midpay jobs that require tasks that follow well-defined procedures and are repeated throughout the day. Think travel agents, salespeople in stores, office assistants and back-office workers like benefits managers and payroll clerks, as well as machine operators and other factory jobs. An August 2012 paper by economists Henry Siu of the University of British Columbia and Nir Jaimovich of Duke University found these kinds of jobs comprise fewer than half of all jobs, yet accounted for nine of 10 of all losses in the Great Recession. And they have kept disappearing in the economic recovery.
Webb Wheel Products makes parts for truck brakes, which involves plenty of repetitive work. Its newest employee is the Doosan V550M, and it?s a marvel. It can spin a 130-pound brake drum like a child?s top, smooth its metal surface, then drill holes ? all without missing a beat. And it doesn?t take vacations or ?complain about anything,? says Dwayne Ricketts, president of the Cullman, Ala., company.
Thanks to computerized machines, Webb Wheel hasn?t added a factory worker in three years, though it?s making 300,000 more drums annually, a 25 percent increase.
?Everyone is waiting for the unemployment rate to drop, but I don?t know if it will much,? Ricketts says. ?Companies in the recession learned to be more efficient, and they?re not going to go back.?
In Europe, companies couldn?t go back even if they wanted to. The 17 countries that use the euro slipped into another recession 14 months ago, in November 2011. The current unemployment rate is a record 11.8 percent.
European companies had been using technology to replace midpay workers for years, and now that has accelerated.
?The recessions have amplified the trend,? says Goos, the Belgian economist. ?New jobs are being created, but not the middle-pay ones.?
In Canada, a 2011 study by economists at the University of British Columbia and York University in Toronto found a similar pattern of middle-class losses, though they were working with older data. In the 15 years through 2006, the share of total jobs held by many midpay, midskill occupations shrank. The share held by foremen fell 37 percent, workers in administrative and senior clerical roles fell 18 percent and those in sales and service fell 12 percent.
In Japan, a 2009 report from Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo documented a ?substantial? drop in midpay, midskill jobs in the five years through 2005, and linked it to technology.
Developing economies have been spared the technological onslaught ? for now. Countries like Brazil and China are still growing middle-class jobs because they?re shifting from export-driven to consumer-based economies. But even they are beginning to use more machines in manufacturing. The cheap labor they relied on to make goods from apparel to electronics is no longer so cheap as their living standards rise.
One example is Sunbird Engineering, a Hong Kong firm that makes mirror frames for heavy trucks at a factory in southern China. Salaries at its plant in Dongguan have nearly tripled from $80 a month in 2005 to $225 today. ?Automation is the obvious next step,? CEO Bill Pike says.
Sunbird is installing robotic arms that drill screws into a mirror assembly, work now done by hand. The machinery will allow the company to eliminate two positions on a 13-person assembly line. Pike hopes that additional automation will allow the company to reduce another five or six jobs from the line.
?By automating, we can outlive the labor cost increases inevitable in China,? Pike says. ?Those who automate in China will win the battle of increased costs.?
Foxconn Technology Group, which assembles iPhones at factories in China, unveiled plans in 2011 to install one million robots over three years.
A recent headline in the China Daily newspaper: ?Chinese robot wars set to erupt.?
Candidates for U.S. president last year never tired of telling Americans how jobs were being shipped overseas. China, with its vast army of cheaper labor and low-value currency, was easy to blame.
But most jobs cut in the U.S. and Europe weren?t moved. No one got them. They vanished. And the villain in this story ? a clever software engineer working in Silicon Valley or the high-tech hub around Heidelberg, Germany ? isn?t so easy to hate.
?It doesn?t have political appeal to say the reason we have a problem is we?re so successful in technology,? says Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University. ?There?s no enemy there.?
Unless you count family and friends and the person staring at you in the mirror. The uncomfortable truth is technology is killing jobs with the help of ordinary consumers by enabling them to quickly do tasks that workers used to do full time, for salaries.
Check out your groceries or drugstore purchases using a kiosk? A worker behind a cash register used to do that.
Buy clothes without visiting a store? You?ve taken work from a salesman.
Click ?accept? in an email invitation to attend a meeting? You?ve pushed an office assistant closer to unemployment.
Book your vacation using an online program? You?ve helped lay off a travel agent. Perhaps at American Express Co., which announced this month that it plans to cut 5,400 jobs, mainly in its travel business, as more of its customers shift to online portals to plan trips.
Software is picking out worrisome blots in medical scans, running trains without conductors, driving cars without drivers, spotting profits in stocks trades in milliseconds, analyzing Twitter traffic to tell where to sell certain snacks, sifting through documents for evidence in court cases, recording power usage beamed from digital utility meters at millions of homes, and sorting returned library books.
Technology gives rise to ?cheaper products and cool services,? says David Autor, an economist at MIT, one of the first to document tech?s role in cutting jobs. ?But if you lose your job, that is slim compensation.?
Even the most commonplace technologies ? take, say, email ? are making it tough for workers to get jobs, including ones with MBAs, like Roshanne Redmond, a former project manager at a commercial real estate developer.
?I used to get on the phone, talk to a secretary and coordinate calendars,? Redmond says. ?Now, things are done by computer.?
Technology is used by companies to run leaner and smarter in good times and bad, but never more than in bad. In a recession, sales fall and companies cut jobs to save money. Then they turn to technology to do tasks people used to do. And that?s when it hits them: They realize they don?t have to re-hire the humans when business improves, or at least not as many.
The Hackett Group, a consultant on back-office jobs, estimates 2 million of them in finance, human resources, information technology and procurement have disappeared in the U.S. and Europe since the Great Recession. It pins the blame for more than half of the losses on technology. These are jobs that used to fill cubicles at almost every company ? clerks paying bills and ordering supplies, benefits managers filing health-care forms and IT experts helping with computer crashes.
?The effect of (technology) on white-collar jobs is huge, but it?s not obvious,? says MIT?s McAfee. Companies ?don?t put out a press release saying we?re not hiring again because of machines.?
___
What hope is there for the future?
Historically, new companies and new industries have been the incubator of new jobs. Start-up companies no more than five years old are big sources of new jobs in developed economies. In the U.S., they accounted for 99 percent of new private sector jobs in 2005, according to a study by the University of Maryland?s John Haltiwanger and two other economists.
But even these companies are hiring fewer people. The average new business employed 4.7 workers when it opened its doors in 2011, down from 7.6 in the 1990s, according to a Labor Department study released last March.
Technology is probably to blame, wrote the report?s authors, Eleanor Choi and James Spletzer. Entrepreneurs no longer need people to do clerical and administrative tasks to help them get their businesses off the ground.
In the old days ? say, 10 years ago ? ?you?d need an assistant pretty early to coordinate everything ? or you?d pay a huge opportunity cost for the entrepreneur or the president to set up a meeting,? says Jeff Connally, CEO of CMIT Solutions, a technology consultancy to small businesses.
Now technology means ?you can look at your calendar and everybody else?s calendar and ? bing! ? you?ve set up a meeting.? So no assistant gets hired.
Entrepreneur Andrew Schrage started the financial advice website Money Crashers in 2009 with a partner and one freelance writer. The bare-bones start-up was only possible, Schrage says, because of technology that allowed the company to get online help with accounting and payroll and other support functions without hiring staff.
?Had I not had access to cloud computing and outsourcing, I estimate that I would have needed 5-10 employees to begin this venture,? Schrage says. ?I doubt I would have been able to launch my business.?
Technological innovations have been throwing people out of jobs for centuries. But they eventually created more work, and greater wealth, than they destroyed. Ford, the author and software engineer, thinks there is reason to believe that this time will be different. He sees virtually no end to the inroads of computers into the workplace. Eventually, he says, software will threaten the livelihoods of doctors, lawyers and other highly skilled professionals.
Many economists are encouraged by history and think the gains eventually will outweigh the losses. But even they have doubts.
?What?s different this time is that digital technologies show up in every corner of the economy,? says McAfee, a self-described ?digital optimist.? ??Your tablet (computer) is just two or three years ago, and it?s already taken over our lives.?
Peter Lindert, an economist at the University of California, Davis, says the computer is more destructive than innovations in the Industrial Revolution because the pace at which it is upending industries makes it hard for people to adapt.
Occupations that provided middle-class lifestyles for generations can disappear in a few years. Utility meter readers are just one example. As power companies began installing so-called smart readers outside homes, the number of meter readers in the U.S. plunged from 56,000 in 2001 to 36,000 in 2010, according to the Labor Department.
In 10 years? That number is expected to be zero.
NEXT: Practically human: Can smart machines do your job?
There are 36 hours, 47 minutes remaining to comment on this story.
Source: http://www.daily-chronicle.com/2013/01/22/recession-technology-flail-middle-class-jobs/a2eizbq/
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Judge Approves $844M Financing For Kodak To Exit Bankruptcy
Kodak has had a rough go of it lately, filing for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy almost a year ago and selling off its portfolio of more than 1000 digital imaging patents just last month. But today the centenarian company has some good news to report, as U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Allan Gropper of the Southern District of New York has approved Kodak's $844 million financing led by Centerbridge Partners LP.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Ddvqep3YNXI/
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Space-miners to crush asteroids and print satellites
Once a wacky idea, commercial asteroid exploration has become a race, with the launch of a second company focused on mining near-Earth space rocks. The newly launched firm plans to survey asteroids, tap them for resources and shape the raw materials into products using 3D printers in space.
Deep Space Industries (DSI) of McLean, Virginia, held a press event at the Santa Monica Museum of Flight in California on Tuesday. "Our business plan is to get into this field as it begins, and it is beginning today," said founder and chairman Rick Tumlinson.
To illustrate the company's ambition, he evoked 19th century pioneers, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who led the first transcontinental US expedition to the Pacific Ocean. "We want to build on the Lewis and Clark legacy of our government space programme and open it up for the settlers and shopkeepers."
The announcement follows the first commercial plan to mine asteroids for precious metals and other resources, announced last April by Planetary Resources of Bellevue, Washington.
Asteroids are full of potentially valuable materials, including nickel, as well as water and gases that could be used to make fuel for future space missions. But much of their value comes from the fact that they're already in space.
Reconnaissance flies
"A typical tonne of asteroidal rock is worth $1 million in orbit ? but only $4000 on Earth," said Mark Sonter, a mining consultant in Australia and a member of DSI's board of directors. "If we can get it in space where we want it to be used, it's potentially extremely valuable material."
DSI hopes to eventually help build, fuel and operate satellites in orbit, without ever bringing the components back to Earth.
As a first step, DSI plans to launch three laptop-sized satellites called FireFlies in 2015 to observe near-Earth asteroids and identify which ones would be the best targets for mining. In 2016, it plans to launch DragonFly spacecraft to bring samples weighing between 23 and 45 kilograms back to Earth.
Then in 2020, the company hopes to start harvesting asteroids for useful goods, particularly the raw products of fuel. DSI expects its first clients to be the owners of the communications satellites that require propellant to stay in their designated orbits.
DSI is also developing a space-based 3D printer called the MicroGravity Foundry, which would grind up asteroids, separate out the useful bits and fuse them into manufactured goods. The firm also wants to build orbiting platforms that can beam high-speed internet and cheap solar energy to anywhere on Earth.
Healthy competition
The company did not announce how much money they already have, or who their initial investors are. "One reason for having the press conference is to become findable by additional investors," said DSI CEO David Gump.
The main competition has famously deep pockets. Planetary Resources is backed by Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, and former Microsoft chief architect Charles Simonyi. They have a similar mission: to send space telescopes to spot asteroids bearing precious metals, and to mine the best candidates. Planetary Resources took a step towards this goal on Monday, unveiling a prototype asteroid-hunting telescope, Arkyd 100.
"Having competition is generally good and it also validates the market," says Alan Stern, a former NASA scientist now working with several firms focused on lunar tourism and mining.
But Tim Spahr, director of the asteroid and comet watching Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, still believes the wannabe miners are underestimating the difficulty of the task. "I remain sceptical, but would love to be wrong," he told New Scientist.
Watch a video of DSI's announcement
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