Rolf Dobelli:

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.

News misleads. Take the following event (borrowed from Nassim Taleb). A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What’s relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. That’s the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in other bridges. But the car is flashy, it’s dramatic, it’s a person (non-abstract), and it’s news that’s cheap to produce. News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads. So terrorism is over-rated. Chronic stress is under-rated. The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is under-rated. Astronauts are over-rated. Nurses are under-rated.

We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk, regardless of its real probability. If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. Bankers and economists – who have powerful incentives to compensate for news-borne hazards – have shown that they cannot. The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely.

Brad Stone:

Over the last decade, the Internet has seeped into that bedrock of the U.S. economy: the housing market. A group of growing and mostly profitable websites have sprung up to help guide consumers through what in many cases will be the largest and most nerve-wracking transaction of their lives. Four sites—Redfin and Zillow (Z), based in Seattle, and Trulia (TRLA) and Realtor.com, based in the San Francisco Bay Area—attract 61 million of the 67 million visitors to real estate websites each month in the U.S., according to ComScore (SCOR). They also generate hundreds of millions in revenue and have helped turn buying a house into entertainment—a spectator sport that can be enjoyed without darting surreptitiously into random open houses. Ninety percent of consumers now start their real estate journeys on the Web, according to the National Association of Realtors.

It all looks at first glance like the same kind of electronic marketplace that has eliminated travel agents, decimated classified ads, depressed stock brokers, and taken the swagger out of car dealers, but it hasn’t dented the fortunes of real estate brokers. A majority of buyers and sellers still wind up working with traditional brokers, one on each side of the deal.

Virginia Postrel:

Ron Johnson, fired as chief executive officer of J.C. Penney this week, failed not because his vision was necessarily wrong, but because in executing it he forgot the first rule of retailing: To sell people things, you first have to get them into the store.
The frequent sales and coupons Penney’s used before Johnson arrived are just one possible way to do that.
Wal-Mart, after all, built its business by offering branded merchandise at everyday low prices. Although it runs sales, it doesn’t depend on them. Instead, Wal-Mart consistently offers low prices on consumer packaged goods that require frequent replenishment. Customers come in for toothpaste, Tide and toilet paper and walk out with T-shirts, candy and discounted DVDs as well. The impulse items make the company hyper-productive, but the staples drive traffic. And for all the headlines Target attracts with its designer collaborations, that chain, where Johnson first made his mark, pulls in regular customers much the same way.
Penney’s, however, doesn’t sell consumables. It’s strongest in home goods – -linens, pillows, window treatments — that often last for years. So Johnson’s strategy of simplifying pricing and cutting back on sales required offering customers some other reason to come into the store. The usual alternative is fresh new merchandise. By quickly turning over their inventories, fast-fashion retailers like Zara or Forever 21 and discounters like TJX’s Marshalls and T.J. Maxx give customers a reason to check in frequently.

Toomas Hendrik Ilves:

The changes in the digital world today represent a dramatically sped-up version of the changes the world underwent in a century of industrialization. It is a paradigm transformation of our world: Notions of a nation’s size, wealth, power, military might, population and G.D.P. mean something altogether different from what they meant a generation ago.

These relations are in constant flux, and old assumptions no longer hold. Today, a small, poor East European country can be a world leader in e-governance and cybersecurity.

In February, the United Nations praised Estonia’s e-Annual Report system, by which entrepreneurs can submit annual reports electronically, as the “best of the best” e-Government application of the past decade. Last autumn, Freedom House ranked Estonia first in Internet freedom for the third year in a row (the United States and Germany were second and third).

Cybersecurity needs to be taken seriously by everyone. We continue to think of cyberthreats in military or classical warfare terms, when in fact cyber can simply render the military paradigm irrelevant. The whole information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure must be regarded as an “ecosystem” in which everything is interconnected. It functions as a whole; it must be defended as a whole.

Matthew Garrahan:

He has first-hand experience of the ascetic life. As a young man he wanted to become a priest and attended a Jesuit seminary for three years. “We could only read the lives of Jesuit saints – not Franciscan saints, only Jesuit saints. The day was Latin, mass, meditation, menial work. The Jesuit upbringing was tantum quantum: you take what you need. Less not more. It’s almost a Buddhist thought, a Greek thought. There’s a balance.”

He calls this “proportionality” and it has become a philosophy that, over the years, has shaped his world view – particularly what he regards as the excesses of market-based capitalism. “The capital game, the market game is: is there ever enough money? No … how can there be enough? But take your body – you need so much salt, but not too much. [You need] some calcium but not too much. There’s an optimum range. The right proportions. But money? No. It never stops.” He suggests a fix that ties together strands of Buddhism and Jesuit Catholicism. The market system, he says, should “be embedded in the cultural biological system”.

………

There were reports in the years that followed of a feud between Brown and Clinton but Brown disputes this. “There was no feud,” he says. “No permanent enemies, no permanent friends … only permanent interests. Somebody said that. A Frenchman?” His press secretary is sitting nearby on a long, worn table that Brown calls the “monastic bench”, where he often holds meetings. “Lord Palmerston,” calls the aide, after consulting his smartphone.

“What?” says Brown.

“He said ‘no permanent enemies, no permanent friends’.”

“I’ll give you another maxim, because it’s so shocking,” says Brown, turning back to me and picking up a small red book. “This is the 12th rule of the Jesuit order.” He opens it at a page and points me to a passage that stresses the “abnegation and continuous mortification of all things possible”. “Abnegation – negate, go against. Mortify – make dead. That’s strong! That’s not the vibe of today.”

Brian S Hall:

U.S. teens’ passionate embrace of smartphones and a “mobile first” mentality to the Internet shows no signs of slowing down. According to the latest Pew Research on teens and technology:

37% of teens in the U.S. have a smartphone.

25% of those aged 12-17 access the Internet “primarily” via a cell phone or smartphone.

Among teens with a smartphone, however, 50% access the Internet primarily via the mobile device.

Girls are more likely than boys to rely on their smartphone as their primary Internet access device.

Maggie Severns:

Vernon Hugh Bowman, a 75-year-old Indiana farmer, says that switching to Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soybeans “made things so much simpler and better.” Monsanto’s patented beans can survive when they are sprayed with the herbicide glyphosate, also known as Roundup, which makes pest control much easier. Monsanto is less impressed with Bowman: The Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday on a lawsuit that the company filed against him in 2007, accusing him of violating its patent on Roundup Ready soybeans.

Here’s what happened: Bowman bought seeds from a grain elevator that sold soybeans for animal feed, industrial use, or other nonplanting purposes. The elevator contained a lot of “second generation” Roundup Ready seeds—the spawn of original seeds that other farmers had bought and harvested from Monsanto. That’s not surprising, since “[Roundup Ready soybeans are] probably the most rapidly adopted technological advance in history,” said Seth Waxman, who is representing Monsanto. “The very first Roundup Ready soybean seed was only made in 1996. And it now is grown by more than 90 percent of the 275,000 soybean farms in the United States.”

Felix Salmon:

The big unanswered question, then, is not whether native has disruptive potential — it clearly does. Rather, it’s whether native will ever be able to truly scale. Native is growth-constrained on two fronts, and that means that if you’re betting on industry-changing disruption, you’re making a risky bet. The first constraint is creative. Native is hard work. Rice talks about how Virgin Mobile has to come up with “several posts a week” when its running a BuzzFeed campaign, and his article is illustrated with a photo of a “creative strategy meeting” where I count 19 people in frame, plus untold others out of it. The amount of human time and effort that goes into a native campaign is enormous, continuous, and it doesn’t decrease much once the campaign is up and running. You can’t just run the same banner a billion times: the marginal daily cost of native campaigns is vastly greater than the marginal daily cost of buying banners.

Eugene Kaspersky:

Here we are, April, on the Kamchatka Peninsula, checking out the Tolbachik volcano erupting – on a long-weekend trip. It’s a long way to go for a long weekend, but for me and crew – it sure was worth it.

Straight to the (lava) chase…

Down fields of freshly cooled (black) lava here flow crackling (bright red) liquid lava streams around 10 meters (30 feet) in width. Sometimes the lava flows get blocked, forming red hot lava lakes. The lava is stodgy, viscous, cloggy, plodding and… awesome! Sometimes it comes up against large rocky growths and finds itself new channels to creep along. Other times it hides under an outer shell that has cooled, and then appears again out of its ‘tunnel’ on to the surface. The meandering red snakes of lava are really quite creepy (he, hey!) – how they form waterfalls here, form islands of black there… Then the red stuff rolls down further, where it thickens and congeals into freaky little hills, which themselves slowly continue to move down further, nudged on by new flows of lava.

The scene is just hypnotic; especially at night when the incandescent lava and red hot rocks are much brighter. Mostly black by day, at night the lava fields are crisscrossed with bright red rivers and studded with similarly bright red spots.

:

Only 20 percent of American consumers’ time on mobile devices is spent on the web. A massive majority, 80 percent, is spent in apps: games, news, productivity, utility, and social networking apps.

Turns out, it’s an app world, after all.

According to app analytics firm Flurry, which tracks app usage on a staggering 300,000 apps on over a billion active mobile devices, we spend an average of 158 minutes each and every day on our smartphones and tablets. Two hours and seven minutes of that is in an app, and only 31 minutes is in a browser, surfing the old-school web.

A big chunk of that 158 minutes is taken up with games — 32 percent — but it’s almost shocking to see how much time a single app and a single company eats up. Eighteen percent of all the time that Americans spend on their phones is spent in the Facebook app, a figure that by itself dwarfs all other social networking apps.