In lieu of the killer tornado that hit Oklahoma city on May 20, 2013, Slate published a map of the most devastating tornadoes to hit the United States since 1950.
As seen in the map, the southwest is the region with the highest frequency of devastating tornadoes.
Source: Slate: Map of the Week: All Killer Tornadoes Since 1950
A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 39 nations, regarding attitudes about the state of the economy in the respondents’ respective countries, yielded interesting results.
Respondents in emerging economies are the most optimistic. A median of 53% believe their economy is doing well, specially in China and Malaysia. In contrast, respondents in developed economies are the most pessimistic. A median of only 24% say their economy is doing well. European nations such as Greece, Italy, Spain, and France are the most pessimistic of all.
In the case of developing economies, some are somewhat optimistic (Philippines and Bolivia), and other not so much (Tunisia and Lebanon).
Source: Pew Research Global Attitudes Project: Widespread Dissatisfaction with Economy
Read full report: Pew Research Global Attitudes Project: Economies of Emerging Markets Better Rated During Difficult Times
A survey conducted by two Swedish economists asked respondents in 80 countries what kind of people they would not like as neighbors, to which many replied “people of a different race”.
The results from that survey are displayed in this map published by the Washington Post. According to the survey, people in English-speaking, Scandinavian, and Latin American countries are the most racially tolerant, with the exception of Venezuela. South Africa shows to be a tolerant country, while the attitudes in Europe show a lot of variation. People in countries such as France, Turkey, India, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Nigeria, South Korea, and Indonesia are the least racially tolerant.
Commodities are raw materials essential for the production of more complex products. Commodities fall into three large categories: agricultural, energy, and metals.
According to this visualization, emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India Indonesia, China, South Africa, etc.) have the largest reserves of certain key energy and metal commodities such as oil, coal, copper, cobalt, iron ore, molybdenum, nickel, zinc, and aluminum.
Source: Business Insider: 36 Maps That Explain The Entire World
Mint.com tracked how much its users spend on gasoline in one month, and how many times they visit the pump in the same period across the United States.
On average, Americans spend $177 on gas in single month, making an average of 6 visits to the pump, and spending an average of $32 in each transaction.
San Jose (California) stands out as the city where Mint users spend the most on gas, an average of $216 in a single month. Other cities where Mint users spend a lot on gas include Birmingham (Alabama), Jacksonville (Florida), Phoenix (Arizona), and Charlotte (North Carolina) to name a few. In contrast, in cities like New York, Brooklyn (New York), and Washington D.C., which have a good public transportation system, the gas bill is between $102 and $112 per month.
Source: Mint: Gas Guzzlers
Every day finished goods and commodities are transported by sea in shipping containers from one port to another across the globe. Standard shipping containers measure 20 feet long by eight feet wide, hence they receive the name of “Twenty-foot Equivalent Units” or TEUs.
The largest port in the world is in Shanghai (China) which saw a volume of 31.74 million TEUs of cargo freight passing through its port in 2011. Shanghai is followed by Singapore (Singapore) which saw a volume of 29.94 million TEUs passing through its port for the same year. Singapore is followed by Hong Kong, Shenzhen (China), Busan (South Korea), Ningbo, Guangzhou, and Qingdao (China), Dubai Ports (United Arab Emirates), and Rotterdam (Netherlands), all in the top ten.
For the interactive map, that allows you to explore each one of the largest 50 ports in the world, visit: The Smithsonian: Interactive: The 50 Largest Ports in the World
MIT economists Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, conducted surveys in developing nations to see which countries survive on a few dollars per day. The cities or countries where people are known to live on meager dollar amounts on a daily bases are not that surprising, but the percentage of the population living under these conditions is.
In Udaipur and Hyderabad (India) a staggering 94% of the population survive on $2 or less per day. In Bangladesh, 69.4% go on $2 or less per day. In Ghana, 67.7% survive on $2 or less per day. In Guatemala, 64.8% of the population survive on $2 or less per day.
Source: GOOD: Living on Less
Oil reserves are the amount of oil that can be technically and economically recovered from the ground.
Nations with the world’s largest oil reserves include Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Russia, and Libya. Saudi Arabia, holds an approximate 234.5 billion barrels of oil reserves, and it has the largest market share for oil production after Russia. Saudi Arabia is followed by Venezuela, with an estimated 211.0 billion barrels of oil reserves, although its current oil production market share is only 3.2%.
By comparison, the United States has an estimated 30.9 billion barrels in oil reserves, and 8.7% market share in oil production.
Source: Spiegel Online: A World without Oil: Companies Prepare for a Fossil-Free Future
This map shows drought severity, measured as the product of the average length of a drought occurrence and how dry it was the drought. This visualization is based on data collected for the period between 1901 and 2008.
The red areas in the map show the regions most severely affected by droughts. The northern region of the African continent stands out as the largest area being affected by severe droughts. Southwestern Africa (Namibia and Botswana) has also been severely affected by droughts in the same period.
Some areas in the Andean region in South America (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina) have also suffered the effects of severe droughts during the past century.
Parts of Australia and Russia have also been affected by extreme drought conditions.
Sources:
The Organization for the Proliferation of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was created to oversee the elimination of existing chemical weapons and monitor the chemical industry to prevent the production of additional chemical weapons. The OPCW was created in 1997 in The Hague, Netherlands, with support from the United Nations (UN).
The OPCW has 188 members states, signatories of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Nations that did not sign the CWC include Syria, Egypt, South Sudan, Somalia, Angola, and North Korea. Myanmar signed it, but it has not ratified it to date.
As of 2012, 71% of global stockpiles of chemical weapons have been destroyed, 46% of the total amount of chemical munitions have been eliminated, and 100% of the chemical plants producing chemical weapons have been decommissioned.
Source: Ria Novosti News Agency: Infographics – Elimination of Chemical Weapons in the World
