You’ve probably heard before that a lot of the Western world’s technological waste, rather than being recycled, gets exported out to poorer countries where the laws are lax enough to allow it. What you may not know is that, thanks to the increasing scarcity of gold and copper, and the abundance of those metals in technology waste, there’s a boom of employment for residents of those countries willing to smash up the junk and pluck out the good parts, as this photo essay documents. The dark side to this recycling is that the unwanted stuff – toxic PCB substrate, for example – seeps into the water supplies. [SlashDot]

To say that self-esteem is worth having is a tautology, but new research indicates that people who are more confident as kids go on to make far better wages in their adult life than the less self-assured. Which bodes well for the teen CEO I mentioned yesterday, and probably explains why I earn about as much as the average burger flipper. Meh.

The membrane just got thinner. Virtual property mogul (and Second Life’s first Real Life millionaire) Anshe Chung has announced plans to open the first cross-platform financial exchange for virtual worlds, which will enable metaverse users to transfer their virtual finances between different synthetic economies. The inevitability of this announcement does nothing to derail the incredible implications – in a few short years we could have an economic ecosystem that deals entirely with the interchange of virtual goods, yet connected to the economy of meatspace. If that doesn’t tweak your science fiction jones, I dont know what does.

Civic planning is a tough gig, because your ability to experiment with new ideas is limited – you can’t just knock down a housing estate to see how it changes the traffic flow, for instance. Which makes it an obvious market for computer modelling, with a team at Arizona State developing sophisticated simulations of human crowd behaviour to help planners and architects make cities safer and more efficient. Which is all well and good, I suppose – but will it lead to the increased homogenisation of urban spaces? And how will they factor in the ways that people change the use of objects and spaces over long periods of time? And how much more complicated do these simulations have to become before turning them off becomes a question of ethics?

This one just in from the “Now I feel really old and unsuccessful” department – 13 year old CEO pitches business idea to entrepreneurial convention. Kudos – that kid’ll go far, though perhaps not with his current idea. If anyone needs me, I’ll be weeping quietly in the corner.