The Economist:

Into this mess has stepped Mr Purcell, who, notwithstanding the size of his institution ($260m in deposits, making it the 177th-largest bank in Texas), has suddenly turned into a rather important banker in America. On June 21st his bank became a plaintiff in a legal challenge brought with two free-market entities in Washington, DC, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the 60 Plus Association, arguing that Dodd-Frank is unconstitutional.

Mr Purcell’s business model, common among Texas rural banks, was to keep loans on its books, internalising both their returns and their risks. In practice, this meant making small loans (under $60,000) at relatively high rates (7%, because small loans suffer from diseconomies of scale) with short terms (five years, to protect the bank against interest-rate risk) and final “balloon” payments that are usually rolled over. This approach differs radically from that of the major banks, which syndicated mortgages through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The bank has not repossessed a home in seven years, or cost taxpayers a penny, but balloon payments and high rates are targeted under Dodd-Frank, which grants regulators wide discretion to decide what is “abusive”. Mr Purcell has stopped issuing mortgages and, because of other Dodd-Frank rules, processing international remittances.

Colin Nederkoorn:

If you’re like me, you woke up this morning and realized the Olympic Games are on and it might be incredible to watch the world’s best athletes compete for medals and national honor.

Flip on the tv

You might have a TV like me that you’ve never used to watch broadcast TV. So, plug in an antenna or spare cable cord, and try to tune yourself some channels.

I didn’t go out and buy an antenna, but I was able to tune quite a few channels. A bunch of commercials, some religious channels and Telemundo.

Telemundo’s olympics coverage comes in CRYSTAL CLEAR in HD on my TV. BUT, Telemundo’s coverage is all in Spanish, and my Spanish is poor. Surprising that it’s so clear with the spare coax cable I used as my antenna.

Jayne O’Donnell:

J.C. Penney hopes to get rid of cashiers and cash registers by 2014, and instead have salespeople use iPod Touch devices to check out customers, or self-checkout lanes.

Starting this weekend, salespeople in Penney’s new Levi’s shops will use only iPads to check out customers. All of Penney’s 1,100 stores will offer mobile checkout by the end of the year, spokeswoman Kate Coultas says.



More than 6,000 Nordstrom salespeople are already using mobile devices to check people out, just like at Apple stores. By the end of this year, Nordstrom salespeople will be able to do everything on their handheld devices that they can at a register, says Jamie Nordstrom, president of the company’s online division.



“I believe the future of our point-of-sale systems is completely mobile,” he says. “It’s hard to know whether it’s in one year or five years because the technology is evolving so rapidly.”

Learn more about our fourth generation native iPad, iPhone and Android apps, here.

Terry Teachout:

With the New Group’s ill-fated Off-Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra” having recently closed on account of bad reviews, the Harold Clurman Theatre will remain dark until further notice, and young playgoers will stop asking me an all-too-familiar question: Who was Harold Clurman, anyway?

Nobody had to ask that question when Clurman died in 1980 at age 78. Though his name was never to be found above the title, he was one of the half-dozen most influential figures in modern American theater. In 1931 Clurman co-founded the Group Theatre, the legendary left-wing drama company that nurtured the early careers of Lee J. Cobb, John Garfield, Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets. In the ’30s he directed the Group Theatre’s productions of Odets’s “Awake and Sing!” and “Golden Boy,” and after World War II he staged the premieres of O’Neill’s “A Touch of the Poet,” Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” and “After the Fall,” William Inge’s “Bus Stop,” Carson McCullers’s “The Member of the Wedding” and Tennessee Williams’s “Orpheus Descending.” Except for Kazan, no other director has succeeded in bringing so many serious new dramas to Broadway.

John Kay:

High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bfb7e6b8-d57b-11e1-af40-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz21ZbdHFAa

In 1906, the great statistician Francis Galton observed a competition to guess the weight of an ox at a country fair. Eight hundred people entered. Galton, being the kind of man he was, ran statistical tests on the numbers. He discovered that the average guess (1,197lb) was extremely close to the actual weight (1,198lb) of the ox. This story was told by James Surowiecki, in his entertaining book The Wisdom of Crowds.

Not many people know the events that followed. A few years later, the scales seemed to become less and less reliable. Repairs were expensive; but the fair organiser had a brilliant idea. Since attendees were so good at guessing the weight of an ox, it was unnecessary to repair the scales. The organiser would simply ask everyone to guess the weight, and take the average of their estimates.

juxtapoz:

With the London Olympics set to open on Friday, July 27, everyone is getting into the celebratory/satirical mood. Banksy was going to miss this opportunity to land a few punches and comical jabs at the increasingly corporate games, and he just produced two new street pieces to show his “support” of the Olympics.

Vincent LaForet:

I recently stumbled across this incredibly cool video that takes you through the ages of title design, starting with D.W. Griffith’s 1916 film, “Intolerance” and ending with the Gaspar Noe’s 2009 film, “Enter The Void” (trust me – this film is as crazy as the title sequence that it has). Throughout the progression of the piece you see how far along title design has come in terms of complexity – but you also see the creativity that has always been there, despite the limits of technology. On its own it is an incredibly interesting piece that really puts some perspective and importance on this often overlooked art form.



But there’s more. The video is really just an introduction piece to an incredible resource called “Art of the Title,” which is a website that does periodic features on various title designs, giving you a behind the scenes look at who made them, and how they were envisioned and executed. It’s incredibly fascinating. You HAVE to watch the making of the title for Boardwalk Empire (and just about every single one of them…)

John Torinus:

I ran this idea out about ten years ago and got no traction. Here we go again: how about about quality audits in health care?

Good quality information has been slow in coming in health care, mainly because not all the big players on the provider side of the equation are all that enthusiastic about having hard readings out there about mortality rates, infections, readmissions and outcomes.

Data and information is emerging, often from Medicare databases, but the pace has been anything but breath taking. Yet the growing army of consumers – estimated at more than 30 million people with personal health accounts and high deductibles – needs quality ratings on providers just as much as they need hard price information.

Professor Sabena:

Here are some examples of the comments I received:

On the positive side: Could not agree more!

On the negative side:
(Humour)The professor will get seated next to John Candy
(Professor) Unlikely …But if I do…. then does that mean I get Darryl Hannah as my girlfriend?

And then there was Angry. I won’t identify him.

Ken Bain:

Many people think of intelligence as static: you are born with lots of brains, very few, or somewhere in between, and that quantum of intelligence largely determines how well you do in school and in life.

The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has never liked this view. “I hardly ever use the word intelligence,” says Mr. Tyson, who directs the Hayden Planetarium in New York. “I think of people as either wanting to learn, ambivalent about learning or rejecting learning.” He speaks from experience: As a young man, he was booted from one doctoral program but managed to get into another and complete his Ph.D.