Matt Townsend:

CJ Chu is a retailer’s nightmare.
 
 The 24-year-old associate for a private-equity firm does “99 percent” of his shopping online — even toothpaste. He’d rather buy groceries on the Web than walk to the supermarket.
 
 “Convenience and free time is something I value,” said Chu, who works for Bridge Growth Partners LLC in New York. “Ordering online just makes more sense.”
 
 Chu is an extreme case. Yet millions of Americans like him are abandoning stores faster than executives predicted, pushing the industry to a precipice. Traditional retailers, for the first time ever in 2014, will generate half their sales growth on the Web, according to Stifel Financial Corp. That means about $18 billion in new revenue generated this year will come from online purchases, an analysis of U.S. Census data shows.
 
 The stampede online will only accelerate as 80 million U.S. millennials start families, buying homes and filling them with stuff. Mobile shopping is giving e-commerce another boost. Next month, Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) will start selling a smartphone that will allow shoppers to scan a product in a mall and purchase it from the company’s online store, giving retailers another reason to fear their most potent Web rival.
 
 It’s widely accepted that traditional chains must mesh physical and online stores into a seamless shopping experience, but “nobody is doing it well,” said Anne Zybowski, vice president for retail insights at Kantar Retail in Boston. “There isn’t any best-in-class because nobody is there yet.”

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Steve Denning:

“Before I read this book,” writes W. Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute “I thought that the history of technology was – to borrow Churchill’s phrase – merely ‘one damned thing after another’. Not so. Carlota Perez shows us that historically technological revolutions arrive with remarkable regularity, and that economies react to them in predictable phases.”
 
 Pérez takes a long-term horizon: several hundred years—much longer than either Christensen or Lepore. She draws on many disciplines: history, economics, finance, technology, sociology and management. Ironically, the breadth and depth of the book is one reason why it has been neglected by academics. It’s too bold and wide-ranging for any of them to accept it as “one of theirs”.
 
 The book is guilty of other academic sins. It is clearly written and succinct—a mere 171 pages. And the succinctness is accompanied by precise details on the vast territory covered—the story of capitalism over the last 250 years.

Nafeez Ahmed:

For Steele, the open source revolution is inevitable, simply because the demise of the system presided over by the 1% cannot be stopped – and because the alternatives to reclaiming the commons are too dismal to contemplate. We have no choice but to step up.
 
 “My motto, a play on the CIA motto that is disgraced every day, is ‘the truth at any cost lowers all other costs'”, he tells me. “Others wiser than I have pointed out that nature bats last. We are at the end of an era in which lies can be used to steal from the public and the commons. We are at the beginning of an era in which truth in public service can restore us all to a state of grace.”

Jared Sinclair:

Of the many new APIs announced at WWDC this summer, HealthKit has been particularly thought-provoking for me. At the risk of sounding like that guy, I think I have a somewhat priviledged perspective of HealthKit. There can’t be that many former registered nurses who’ve switched to iOS app development and tried to start a healthcare data company.
 
 I’ve devoted the better part of the last four years to understanding the healthcare industry, both its current problems and its possible futures. Along the way I’ve learned many things – some hopeful, some downright depressing. I ought to describe how HealthKit looks from my vantage point.
 
 Before jumping into HealthKit, let’s take a step back and look at the past and present state of healthcare information – what it is, where it’s stored, and how it’s transmitted and used. I’ll limit my description to the US since that is what I’m most familiar with.

Lauritzen Gardens:

Two of the greatest locomotives ever to power Union Pacific Railroad sit at the southwest point of the Lauritzen Gardens property, highly visible to passersby on Interstate 80 and welcoming motorists to Nebraska. On grand display are Centennial No. 6900 – the largest and most powerful diesel-electric locomotive ever built – and Big Boy No. 4023 – the world’s largest steam locomotive.

Featuring several plazas, seating areas, a grand staircase, “canyon” stone walls, interpretive signage, sculpture and walkways, the park documents Union Pacific Railroad’s role in the development of Omaha and the West.

The park bears the name of former Union Pacific Chairman and CEO John C. Kenefick, and is landscaped with native plants and grasses maintained by Lauritzen Gardens horticulture staff.

bing duckduckgo google wikipedia

Full screen panorama: tap/click then pan or zoom in any direction.

Second perspective.

“Big Boy”.

## The scenes were captured using hand-held “stabilization”. There are a few errors. Sorry.

Everyday Systems:

There’s one thing strange about “competitive” sports teams. Although teams compete with one another for championships, they act in unison to protect one another’s business; they are a cartel. Therefore, a league should actually be considered a single, uniform entity. They vote together and present a single face towards outsiders in all business matters.
 
 We see this behavior strongly enforced when a team’s owners experience financial turmoil. In a competitive environment, the fittest survive and the weak perish; in the professional sports world, the league supports the struggling team through financial distress. For example, the MLB league office gave an emergency $25 million loan to the New York Mets owners after they struggled to pay their expenses. It also happened in 2010 when the owner of the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets, George Shinn, was struggling financially. The league purchased the Hornets from Shinn and the Hornets were jointly owned by the 29 other teams’ owners until an official purchaser could be found.
 
 Another mark of a cartel is exclusivity, No single owner can join the league or do what he wants without the approval of the rest of the league. During the Hornets sale process, many potential owners emerged who wanted to move the Hornets out of New Orleans. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison had offered $350 million – far above market value – but was widely thought to want to move the team to his native Bay Area. The NBA refused to let Shinn sell his own private property at the best price. He could only sell to a person who would keep the team in New Orleans.

Gail Becker:

Selfie-mania has taken center stage at the Oscars, the Oval Office and, of course, most of our Facebook feeds. Perhaps, then, it is little wonder the once innocent form of self-expression is now transforming how we enjoy entertainment.
 
 In our eighth annual study on how and why people consume and share entertainment, we found consumers in the U.S., UK and China want their entertainment “selfie-style” – centered on the individual, immediately gratifying, engaging and shareable across social networks.
 
 We believe our selfie-obsessed world is indicative of consumers’ desire to be active participants in their entertainment, which can translate into big opportunities for brands who can help empower that engagement. Brands that can successfully deliver or enhance compelling entertainment stand to gain and grow.
 
 “Binge-Watching” Escalates
 
 The study’s findings show that with skyrocketing access to online and on-demand content, binge-watching TV shows is pervasive across all markets (U.S. – 94 percent; UK – 89 percent; China – 99 percent).
 
 The phenomenon is fueled by the availability of high-quality, engaging entertainment. Contrary to speculation that increased binge-watching is driven largely by the social currency associated with being up to date, our findings indicate that the primary drivers are actually internal factors.

Julia Angwin:

For years people have noticed a funny thing about Facebook’s ubiquitous Like button. It has been sending data to Facebook tracking the sites you visit. Each time details of the tracking were revealed, Facebook promised that it wasn’t using the data for any commercial purposes.
 
 No longer. Last week, Facebook announced it will start using its Like button and similar tools to track people across the Internet for advertising purposes.
 
 Here is the long history of the revelations and Facebook’s denials:
 
 Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg introduces the “transformative” Like button…
 
 April 21, 2010 – Facebook introduces the “Like” button in 2010 at its F8 developer conference. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg declares that it will be “the most transformative thing we’ve ever done for the Web.”
 
 He says his goal is to encourage a Web where all products and services use people’s real identity. He suggests, in fact, that creating a personally identifiable web experience could be divine: “When you go to heaven, all of your friends are all there and everything is just the way you want it to be,” he says. “Together, lets build a world that is that good.”

Ryan Tracy:

“High gross inflows into regulation during times of regulatory intensity may reflect workers moving into [the] regulatory sector to get schooled in the new complexity,” the researchers write.
 
 So, rather than joining the government to go easy on banks, the paper suggests workers may be coming to Washington to gain a better understanding of how regulation works — and then using that knowledge to land higher-paying private sector jobs.
 
 The paper also found regulators are having trouble retaining workers. About 64% of people that started working in regulation in 2008 stayed in those jobs for three years or more, the paper found. That compared to 88% for workers that began in 1988. And workers with higher education seem particularly inclined to leave, the paper said. (It also noted that “job flows” in and out of the regulatory sector were still smaller than in other parts of the labor market.)

Jill LePore:

In “The Innovative University,” written with Henry J. Eyring, who used to work at the Monitor Group, a consulting firm co-founded by Michael Porter, Christensen subjected Harvard, a college founded by seventeenth-century theocrats, to his case-study analysis. “Studying the university’s history,” Christensen and Eyring wrote, “will allow us to move beyond the forlorn language of crisis to hopeful and practical strategies for success.” On the basis of this research, Christensen and Eyring’s recommendations for the disruption of the modern university include a “mix of face-to-face and online learning.” The publication of “The Innovative University,” in 2011, contributed to a frenzy for Massive Open Online Courses, or moocs, at colleges and universities across the country, including a collaboration between Harvard and M.I.T., which was announced in May of 2012. Shortly afterward, the University of Virginia’s panicked board of trustees attempted to fire the president, charging her with jeopardizing the institution’s future by failing to disruptively innovate with sufficient speed; the vice-chair of the board forwarded to the chair a Times column written by David Brooks, “The Campus Tsunami,” in which he cited Christensen.