Lucy Kellaway:

Two years ago I graduated from Oxford university with a 2:1 in philosophy, politics and economics. After a year of looking for a job, I was hired by a large and very well-known business. At first I was in awe, but now I’ve discovered something that surprises and depresses me. Most of my colleagues are neither terribly bright nor terribly hardworking. As this is my first experience of corporate life I’m puzzled and want to know – is it me? Is it them? Am I missing something? I just don’t get it; if these companies are so hard to get into, how come most of the people who have made it are so mediocre?

Graduate trainee, male, 24

ProPublica:

We’re tracking where taxpayer money has gone in the ongoing bailout of the financial system. Our database accounts for both the broader $700 billion bill and the separate bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

For each entity, we provide a “Net Outstanding” amount, which shows how deep taxpayers are in the hole after accounting for any revenue the government has received (usually through interest or dividends).

Companies that failed to repay the government and resulted in a loss are shaded red. You can see a list of those investments here. All other investments either returned a profit to the government or might still be repaid. Recipients of aid through TARP’s housing programs (such as mortgage servicers and state housing orgs) received subsidies that were never intended to be repaid, so we don’t mark those as losses..

Sim Chi Yin:

Li Zhensheng’s photographs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution are perhaps the most complete and nuanced pictorial account of the decade of turmoil ignited by Mao Zedong.

Mr. Li was a photojournalist for the local paper in Harbin, capital of China’s northernmost province of Heilongjiang. That is where he did his life’s work documenting the Cultural Revolution, taking the “positive” propaganda images of masses whipped up in revolutionary fervor for the newspaper, and also the “negative,” more nuanced, questioning pictures. He snipped those frames off his film and hid them under the parquet floorboards of his house until the revolution ended. He did not show these pictures in China until the late 1980s. Even today, given the sensitivities that linger over the Cultural Revolution in China, his work is more often seen overseas rather than at home.

David Martindale:

1 When you look back over four decades in the music business, what do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment?



The main thing I would like to say is that I have become the person I wanted to be. As opposed to reaching goals but being an alcoholic, or reaching goals but having four failed marriages, or reaching goals but having kids in rehab. A lot of people reach their goals, but at a terrific price.

Lora Kolodny:

Though the first one hasn’t even come off the production line yet, the makers of a new “telepresence” robot called the “Double” attracted more than $1 million worth of preorders within three weeks.

“It’s a Segway for your iPad,” quipped David Cann, founder and chief executive of Miami-based Double Robotics, at Y Combinator’s Demo Day in August, where he showed off the robot’s capabilities to investors.

Connecting an iPad to the Double turns it into a roving telepresence device. The first edition Double features an aluminum base, urethane and plastic wheels, custom control systems and iOS software that lets a user remotely drive the robot, video chat with those who it encounters, and peer into the spaces where it roams.

Paul Graham:

I’ve done several types of work over the years but I don’t know another as counterintuitive as startup investing.

The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best ideas look initially like bad ideas.

The first rule I knew intellectually, but didn’t really grasp till it happened to us. The total value of the companies we’ve funded is around 10 billion, give or take a few. But just two companies, Dropbox and Airbnb, account for about three quarters of it.

In startups, the big winners are big to a degree that violates our expectations about variation. I don’t know whether these expectations are innate or learned, but whatever the cause, we are just not prepared for the 1000x variation in outcomes that one finds in startup investing.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson:

He continues: “I think a lot of great software has been written by people who are scratching a short-term itch, something which has been niggling them for ages, but in the back of their mind they’ve got a wonderful long-term plan.”

But is there enough big academic innovation going on, I ask, or do Silicon Valley wannabes now just dream of an Instagram-style fast $1bn from creating applications that make digital snaps look like their parents’ Polaroids and selling them to Facebook?

“I’m biased to think that there hasn’t been enough. I would have liked to have seen more development around open data,” he replies. Berners-Lee, who has spent years working on the “semantic web” of machine-processable data, is a director of the UK government’s new Open Data Institute, which aims to make more official data available and to train people how to use it to commercial and other ends.

AlJazeera:

Why has the mainstream US media failed to get past the rhetoric of political ads during this presidential campaign?

Political ads rarely tell the truth and in this year’s election campaign, facts have tended to matter less. This is where mainstream media should step up.

But so far, the US media have not shown the appetite or the stomach to get past the rhetoric and get to the truth. In this week’s News Divide, we look at the politics of telling the truth in a heated election campaign.

Richard Epstein:

Google reminds me of Adam, the cute, 100-foot-tall toddler in the 1992 Rick Moranis film, Honey I Blew Up the Kid. In case you missed it, Adam keeps stumbling over buildings, mistakes real cars for toys, and ultimately threatens the existence of Las Vegas. Adam is also the name of the errant father of the human race. And Google is the company named after an astronomically large number (1 with a hundred zeros after it) that controls access to most of the information on earth and that finds innovative new ways to get in trouble several times a year.
In 2010, Google’s Street View teams – the mobile crews that are systematically filming every street and building in the world, including your home – were accused of deliberately capturing people’s names, telephone numbers, emails, text messages, passwords, search histories, and even online dating information as they drove from neighbourhood to neighbourhood in the US and more than 30 other countries between 2006 and 2010. Google snatched the data from Wi-Fi networks. This is akin to what those nasty adults in the white van were doing when they drove around the neighborhood trying to find ET, but on a spectacular scale.

Serious Eats: