Ed Wallace:

Even more important to the story line could be the fact that farm prices would explode again in corn country, thanks to the increasing prices the futures markets were bidding for that particular commodity. As Fortune magazine reported this May 10, the Kansas City Federal stated, “despite the drought in Iowa last year, farmland prices have nearly doubled since 2009 to an average price of $8,296 an acre.”

So that 1989 movie’s charming idealism could be updated to today’s more cynical and extremely profitable reality: Between the near tripling of the price of corn and the bubble-level price of $8,296 an acre for Iowa farmland, Kinsella and his family find that their windfall is far greater than watching the ghosts of the 1919 White Sox play yet another boring game.

In the film’s climax, Kinsella would walk proudly out onto the field. There he would inform his father and Shoeless Joe Jackson that they’ve played their last game on his farm because, after he sells the final corn crop for a fortune on the commodities market, he will be selling the farm for eight grand an acre. And with that line the idealistic Ray Kinsella would become the Gordon Gekko of Iowa.

The Economist:

You have not had an easy time of it over the last few years
No. I had a horrible heart attack and still have symptoms of that sometimes. Then cancer, which is in remission. But the stroke is the hardest thing because I just lost my ability to speak and to write. So I have had to relearn that literally one word at a time, and sometimes I use the wrong word or can’t find words. But overall I feel very blessed

It is incredibly brave to start lecturing again
My wife comes most of the times I teach and stands on the front row to help me. She’s been wonderfully supportive

In your lecture you suggested that firms are too beholden to data. How does that view fit with the age of big data?
It is truly scary to me. By definition, big data cannot yield complicated descriptions of causality. Especially in healthcare. Almost all of our diseases occur in the intersections of systems in the body. For example, there is a drug that is marketed by Elan BioNeurology called TYSABRI. It was developed for MS [multiple sclerosis]. It turns out that of the people who have MS a proportion respond magnificently to TYSABRI. And others don’t. So what do you conclude from this? Is it just a mediocre drug? No. It is that there is one disease but it manifests itself in different ways. How does big data figure out what is the core of what is going on?

You have written much about how technology will disrupt higher education
Two thing are salient. Firstly, the technology per se is not disruptive or sustaining. Rather it is the way it is deployed in the market. So if all that Harvard did was provide MOOCs to everyone so they could employ the technology in existing business models, it wouldn’t change much. But where it would make huge difference is on the delivery of education amongst a population that can’t come to Harvard Business School. And those are people who are working, or who have kids, and they can’t drop it all to get a traditional education. So firms have started corporate universities, and rather than saying you need to take this course for a semester and you have to learn what we say you need to know, corporate universities call Harvard up and say: “We need to teach strategy in a week. It needs to be customised to the, say, chicken industry. And it needs to start on this day and finish on this day.” And that’s a very different delivery of content. So MOOCs will be important when we are using that to replace learning from a teacher to learning on the job. But these will be a one to one replacement of a real teacher.

Much more on Clay Christensen, here.

Tap or click on the photo to view a larger, panoramic image. A beautiful, warm day to bale hay.

One does not often see traditional hay bales. Today’s approach is generally “round bales” or large, “square bales“.

STEPHEN BRAUN, ANNE FLAHERTY, JACK GILLUM and MATT APUZZO:

The revelation of Prism this month by the Washington Post and Guardian newspapers has touched off the latest round in a decade-long debate over what limits to impose on government eavesdropping, which the Obama administration says is essential to keep the nation safe.

But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts show that, while Prism has attracted the recent attention, the program actually is a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort.

Americans who disapprove of the government reading their emails have more to worry about from a different and larger NSA effort that snatches data as it passes through the fiber optic cables that make up the Internet’s backbone. That program, which has been known for years, copies Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis.

Whether by clever choice or coincidence, Prism appears to do what its name suggests. Like a triangular piece of glass, Prism takes large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information.

John le Carré:

In my recent novel A Delicate Truth, a retired and patently decent British foreign servant accuses his old employers of being party to a Whitehall coverup, and for his pains is promptly threatened with the secret courts. Yet amid all the comment that my novel briefly provoked, this particular episode attracted no attention.

What are secret courts? Why do we need them? To protect Britain’s special relationship with the United States, we are officially told; to protect the credibility and integrity of our intelligence services. Never mind that for decades we have handled security-sensitive cases by clearing the court whenever necessary, and allowing our secret servants to withhold their names and testify from behind screens, real or virtual: now, all of a sudden, the credibility and integrity of our intelligence services are at stake, and need urgent and draconian protection.

Never mind the credibility and integrity of parliament and centuries of British justice: our spies come first. And remember, these aren’t criminal courts. These are civil courts where anyone attempting to obtain redress for a real or perceived injustice perpetrated against him by British or American secret agencies must have his claims heard and dealt with in secret.

Paul Carr:

If we’ve learned anything in the past few days it’s that the NSA does precious little of its own spying, relying instead on companies like Palantir and Booz Allen Hamilton. Indeed, Palantir is just one of dozens – hundreds? – of Silicon Valley companies developing and operating the tools used by intelligence agencies like the NSA. If the dystopian drama that Arrington imagines ever actually plays out, it’ll likely do so using tools created by a private company located within a dozen miles of Palo Alto.

As the Financial Times’ April Dembosky reminds us, the relationship between the Valley and Homeland Security is nothing new. The Internet started out as a government project, designed to keep communication lines open in the event of a nuclear attack. In 1999 the CIA established In-Q-Tel, a venture capital fund to invest in technology companies that might be useful to the folks in Langley or Fort Meade.

A look at In-Q-Tel’s board of trustees shows how close the relationship between the geeks and the sneaks has become. The board is almost indistinguishable from that of a major Valley VC firm: Jim Barksdale former CEO and president of Netscape – sits next to Howard Cox of Greylock, sits next to Ted Schley of KPMG… sits across from David E. Jeremiah, the Chairman of Wackenhut Services Inc and A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, Former Executive Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

In-Q-Tel’s investment portfolio, at least on first glance, also seems remarkably similar to that of a regular Valley fund, with Web 2.0-y names like “illogic” and “Delphix” and “Connectify”. The only difference is that the companies on the list are all “focused on new and emerging commercial technologies that have the potential to give the CIA and broader U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) mission-advantage today and in the future.”

In-Q-Tel’s highest profile investment is Palantir – the data mining firm founded with additional money from Valley uber-Libertarian Peter Thiel – but In-Q-Tel’s entire portfolio includes over 100 companies, all reflecting the CIA’s current big obsessions: “big data”, video surveillance and encryption.

Glenn Greenwald:

I haven’t been able to write this week here because I’ve been participating in the debate over the fallout from last week’s NSA stories, and because we are very busy working on and writing the next series of stories that will begin appearing very shortly. I did, though, want to note a few points, and particularly highlight what Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez said after Congress on Wednesday was given a classified briefing by NSA officials on the agency’s previously secret surveillance activities:

“What we learned in there is significantly more than what is out in the media today. . . . I can’t speak to what we learned in there, and I don’t know if there are other leaks, if there’s more information somewhere, if somebody else is going to step up, but I will tell you that I believe it’s the tip of the iceberg . . . . I think it’s just broader than most people even realize, and I think that’s, in one way, what astounded most of us, too.”

The Congresswoman is absolutely right: what we have reported thus far is merely “the tip of the iceberg” of what the NSA is doing in spying on Americans and the world. She’s also right that when it comes to NSA spying, “there is significantly more than what is out in the media today”, and that’s exactly what we’re working to rectify.

Andrew Hill:

Harvard Business Review has dubbed the years between 1911 – when Frederick Winslow Taylor published his book The Principles of Scientific Management – and 2011 “The Management Century”. Taylor’s breakthrough was to see that production line productivity could be improved by using “scientific” methods of organisation.

The approach has been criticised for imposing a mechanistic regime on workers in the interests of pure efficiency, but it triggered more research into psychological and sociological ways to make manufacturing more productive.

Plenty of management techniques have helped to improve the ability of managers to fulfil their fundamental task. China-based car manufacturers, for example, are using the production line efficiency methods pioneered by Japan’s Toyota and others.