C.Z. Nnaemeka:

The startup scene today, and by ‘scene’ I’m sweeping a fairly catholic brush over a large swath of people – observers, critics, investors, entrepreneurs, ‘want’repreneurs, academics, techies, and the like – seems to be riven into two camps.

On one side stand those who believe that entrepreneurs have stopped chasing and solving Big Problems – capital B, capital P: clean energy, poverty, famine, climate change, you name it. I needn’t replay their song here; they’ve argued their cases far more eloquently elsewhere. In short, they contend that too many brains and dollars have been shoveled into resolving what I call ‘anti-problems’ – interests usually centered about food or fashion or ‘social’or gaming. Something an anti-problem company might develop is an app that provides restaurant recommendations based on your blood type, a picture of your childhood pet, the music preferences of your 3 best friends, and the barometric pressure of the nearest city beginning with the letter Q. (That such an app does not yet exist is reminder still of how impoverished a state American scientific education has descended. Weep not! We redouble our calls for more STEM funding.)

On the other side stand those who believe that entrepreneurs have stopped chasing and solving Big Problems – capital B, capital P – that there are too many folks resolving anti-problems… BUT just to be on the safe side, the venture capitalists should keep pumping tons of money into those anti-problem entrepreneurs because you never know when some corporate leviathan – Google, Facebook, Yahoo! – will come along and buy what yesterday looked like a nonsense app and today is still a nonsense app, but a nonsense app that can walk a bit taller, held aloft by the insanities of American exceptionalism. For not only is our sucker birthrate still high in this country (one every minute, baby!), but our suckers are capitalists bearing fat checks.

Arpan Shrestha:

Solukhumbu, Nepal – Twenty-year-old Parshuram Thalung finished school in the fifth grade. As the eldest of the seven siblings, he became a porter to support his family, thereby joining a legion of men and women in Nepal who literally bear the burden of every bid to scale the world’s highest peak Mount Everest.

Carrying heavy loads up high altitudes – from tents to gas cylinders – the porters are the unsung foot soldiers behind every expedition. But sixty years after the peak was first scaled, they still rarely occupy the spotlight and their back-breaking hard work is barely recognised.

Porters are commonly exploited and discriminated against. The business is unregulated. The trade unions have eroded, and brokers now decide who gets to carry what and for how much.

Hiking the challenging terrain with the best mountain gear and a small backpack is exhausting – but porters often make the journey without heavy clothing and sturdy footwear, while carrying loads of 50-70 kilograms on average.

Some porters even carry large wooden planks that can weigh up to 150 kilograms.

Chris Baus:

The house my parents owned when I was born recently sold for $4000 [1]. I’m not omitting a zero or two. That’s about the price of a used 2001 Honda Civic with 150,000 miles — maybe the Honda is worth a bit more. My parents sold the house for $12,000 (three zeros) in the ’70s. Times have been tough for as long as I can remember my hometown of Jamestown (about 60 miles from Buffalo), NY, but I still found this surprising. This is especially astonishing if your are faced with increasing rent and real estate prices in metropolitan areas like NYC, Seattle, and San Francisco.

Alastair Leithead:

The University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies is leading the way in creating virtual humans. The result may produce real help for those in need.

The virtual therapist sits in a big armchair, shuffling slightly and blinking naturally, apparently waiting for me to get comfortable in front of the screen.

“Hi, I’m Ellie,” she says. “Thanks for coming in today.”

She laughs when I say I find her a little bit creepy, and then goes straight into questions about where I’m from and where I studied.

Texas Observer:

The Molly National Journalism Prize of 2013—Recognizing Superior Journalism in the Tradition of Molly Ivins

The 2013 annual MOLLY Prize will be awarded for an article or series of up to four short, related articles or columns telling the stories that need telling, challenging conventional wisdom, focusing on civil liberties and/or social justice, and embodying the intelligence, deep thinking and/or passionate wit that marked Molly’s work.

The MOLLY Prize and two Honorable Mentions will be presented at an awards dinner on Thursday, June 6, 2013, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Austin, Texas, keynoted by a special guest in the tradition of past keynoters (Dan Rather, Ellen Goodman, Seymour Hersh, Gail Collins, and Paul Krugman).

John Quiñones, the seven-time Emmy Award-winning ABC News broadcaster, will be keynote speaker. Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist Connie Schultz will be the emcee/presenter. Lyndon and Kay Olson are Honorary Chairs of the event, at which the Bernard Rapoport Philanthropy Award will be presented to Susan Longley of Austin, president of The Longley Group and of The Texas Democracy Foundation.

The program highlight will be the presentation of the 2013 MOLLY Prize and two honorable mention awards. A Board of Advisors composed of prominent journalists reviewed all entries and selected the competition finalists.

John Markoff:

JERUSALEM — Last month, on a freeway from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, I sat in the driver’s seat of an Audi A7 while software connected to a video camera on the windshield drove the car at speeds up to 65 miles an hour — making a singular statement about the rapid progress in the development of self-driving cars.

While the widely publicized Google car and other autonomous vehicles are festooned with cameras, radar and the laser range finders called lidars, this one is distinctive because of the simplicity and the relatively low cost of its system — just a few hundred dollars’ worth of materials. “The idea is to get the best out of camera-only autonomous driving,” said Gaby Hayon, senior vice president for research and development at Mobileye Vision Technologies, the Israeli company that created the system in the Audi.

Steve Lohr:

The “next big thing” lists are a well-worn staple of technology analysts and consultants, typically delivered just before the calendar turns to a new year.

A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, delivers a twist on the art form, and the difference is more than the timing. The 154-page report not only selects a dozen “disruptive” technologies from a candidate list of 100, but also measures their economic impact.

By 2025, the 12 technologies — led by the mobile Internet, the automation of knowledge work, and the Internet of Things — have the potential to deliver economic value of up to $33 trillion a year worldwide, according to the McKinsey researchers.

That would be a sweeping and disruptive effect indeed, since economists project that by 2025 global economic output will be about $100 trillion.

The McKinsey report does include the estimated value of the social benefits of using a more efficient technology, like time saved. Such benefits — known as “consumer surplus” — are not included in conventional measures of economic output. (An example would be the value of time saved by quickly finding answers to questions by using a search engine. Google economists estimate that saving at up to $65 billion annually.)

We have so much to be thankful for. Watching a bit of this morning’s activities in the drizzle, I was reminded of the greatest commandment: Love God, Love Your Neighbor and a third part via a bumper sticker – Change the World.

Evgeny Morozov:

And what of the almighty sewing machine? That great beacon of hope—described as “America’s Chief Contribution to Civilization” in Singer’s catalog from 1915—did not achieve its cosmopolitan mission. (How little has changed: a few years ago, one of Twitter’s co-founders described his company as a “triumph of humanity.”) In 1989 the Singer company, in a deeply humiliating surrender to the forces of globalization, was sold off to a company owned by a Shanghai-born Canadian that went bankrupt a decade later. American machines, American brains, and American money were no longer American. One day Google, too, will fall. The good news is that, thanks in part to this superficial and megalomaniacal book, the company’s mammoth intellectual ambitions will be preserved for posterity to study in a cautionary way. The virtual world of Google’s imagination might not be real, but the glib arrogance of its executives definitely is.

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