Berlin’s trendence institute surveyed over 300,000 European graduates on their perceived career prospects Illustration: Christine Oliver for the Guardian

Or what to do with millions of extra graduates.

Europe isn’t alone in facing the problem of graduate unemployment. The BRIC countries are feeling it too.

The numbers are staggering. In India one in three graduates up to the age of 29 is unemployed, according to a Labour Ministry report released last November. Total unemployment in the country is officially closer to 12%.

In China this month a record 7.26 million will graduate from the country’s universities – more than seven times the number 15 years ago.

Unemployment among new Chines graduates six months after leaving university is officially around 15%.

The real unemployment rate could be closer to 30% – some 2.3 million unemployed from this year’s graduating cohort alone, according to Joseph Cheng, professor of political science at City University of Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, back home in Europe, graduates expect to submit an average of 60 applications before landing their first job.  The average wait between graduation and employment is approaching six months. That’s the average.

I don’t usually post stuff that’s already all over the news media, but the publication of the first results from Planck requires some clarification.

Big, expensive observation missions are put in place with one final aim: to test our model of the Universe. That’s what science is all about.

The results from Planck confirm Lambda CDM (the Condordance Model). Excellent. This increases our confidence in our model. Karl Popper’s “falsifiability” process is a trifle more difficult than good old confidence (used with huge success, and no hang-ups at all, by stock market modellers, but  I digress).

Upshot: we can trust our model.

There is another question though. Can we rule out other models? Now this is what keeps scientists in employment. If our current model were the final word, it would be the end of science (predicted countless times).

The short answer is no. Planck does not rule out models with an evolving dark energy equation of state. Huge sigh of relief all round. We’re not on the dole yet.

It also shows (sorry – “does not rule out the absence of”) stuff that shouldn’t be there with the current model of inflation. So some tweaking required there. The good news in that particular market is that inflation is so poorly understood anyway. So tweaking it won’t cause cataclysmic paradigm shifts.

Bottom line: a splendid job, with excellent results, and a good return on investment.

Planck will probably not give us any teflon-coated frying pans but at €700 million, it’s an absolute bargain, and well worth it.

It was bound to happen sooner or later. The rising number of pirate attacks on merchant and private vessels in the Indian Ocean has driven the already lucrative private security business seaward. A British company has set up a maritime security company to deter pirate attacks and, it is presumed, to engage in offensive action if extreme circumstances. In other words, a privateering venture.

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Will Humans Eventually All Look Like Brazilians? – Yahoo! News.

The Economist has just published an interesting – and frightening – interactive map showing public debt across the world. It calls it the Global Debt Clock.

It makes for uncomfortable viewing. Here’s what it looks like on 4 September 2012 at 2143 GMT.

Demonocracy is an interesting little site which provides graphics for visualising all those hard-to-visualise economic data. Here for instance are the trillions of dollars of debt owned by eleven of the world’s top debtor nations, stacked in 100-dollar bills.