Business Week:

As part of its anniversary celebration, BusinessWeek is presenting a series of weekly profiles of the greatest innovators of the past 75 years. Some made their mark in science or technology; others in management, finance, marketing, or government. In late September, 2004, BusinessWeek will publish a special commemorative issue on Innovation.

Frederick W. Smith, founder of FedEx Corp. (FDX

), has transportation in his blood. His grandfather was a steamboat captain, and his father built from scratch a regional bus line that became the Southern backbone of the Greyhound Bus system. Smith learned to fly as a teenager, a skill he turned to cash by working weekends as a charter pilot during his years as a student at Yale University in the 1960s. While flying students and other passengers around, Smith had the insight that led him to revolutionize the delivery business. He noticed that he was also frequently ferrying spare parts for computer companies such as IBM (IBM

) that didn’t want to wait for the passenger airlines to get critical components to customers.

Izabella Kaminska:

This won’t be popular.

But it’s an important alternative to the “it’s expropriation” view on Cyprus.

While the decision to force a bank levy on depositors creates an important precedent, it also represents something much more complex than pure confiscation or forfeiture. It’s certainly not expropriation in the communist or command economy sense, that’s for sure.

In fact, I’d argue that what it really represents is the inevitable shift away from a debt funded economy to an equity funded one.

That’s not to say the shift has been managed fairly or logically. I’m with Willem Buiter on the point that it would have been better if small island depositors had been spared. But I’m also with him on the point that this is ultimately a step in the right direction.

It all comes down to the need to capitalise failing banks with equity, and to get creditors taking responsibility for their bad investments.

Patroclos:

OUR EU partners did actually refer to this product of blackmail as a rescue package. This rescue package will drive away all international business from Kyproulla, drastically reduce our GDP and possibly trigger a run on the banks as soon they open on Tuesday.

Of course things would be 10 times worse without the package because the collapse of the banks would be a certainty, the haircut of bank deposits would be in the region of 70 per cent and the state would have no money to pay the poor public parasites.

But this is the option most of our political parties seem to prefer if yesterday’s statements by deputies were anything to go by. So there is the likelihood that when deputies are called to vote on the haircut bill today they will reject the trim thus paving the way for a number one.

Someone should inform them that it is not the Annan plan they would be voting for, because in this case heroic resistance would come at a very high price. The choice is not between change and keeping things as they are – it is between disaster and annihilation, which is a bit of no-brainer.

Anna Scott:

“New technologies have made it easier for governments, businesses and civil society to collect data, share information, target resources, provide feedback and measure progress”, writes Judith Randel from the research centre Development Initiatives. “Information can help to build trust between governments and citizens, allowing people to exercise their rights, hold decision makers to account, reduce corruption and make more informed choices in their daily lives.”

But for people in developing countries to benefit from information in this way, they need to be able to access it and empowered to use it. The responsibility of providing access often falls to the development community, but is enough being done to turn access into knowledge, and knowledge into power?

Progress is being made, as more initiatives emerge that aim to bring data to those in the field. But while such projects are empowering those they can reach, what about those they can’t? In a recent live chat on beneficiaries-led development, Linda Raftree, a senior adviser at Plan International emphasised that the marginalised should not be forgotten. “Many factors will [determine] who participates and how they participate, including disability, literacy and language abilities. Open data or technology enabled participation systems must be designed with this in mind”, she says.

Felix Salmon:

Quartz, in this deal, is getting one article, which needs a fair amount of editing; it’s a tiny proportion of Quartz’s daily output. Meanwhile, Brandtone is getting something very valuable indeed. Just look at the US flack-to-hack ratio: it’s approaching 9:1, according to the Economist, which means that for every professional journalist, there are nine people, some of them extremely well paid, trying to persuade that journalist to publish something about a certain company. That wouldn’t be the case if those articles weren’t worth serious money to the companies in question.
How valuable? How about somewhere between $250,000 and $1 million? That’s the amount of money that Fortune’s ad-sales team was asking, earlier this month, for a new product called Fortune Trusted Original Content:

I Love Typography:

In 2013 to mark the bicentenary of Bodoni’s death, designers Riccardo Olocco and Jonathan Pierini will publish the Parmigiano Typographic System which has the ambition of being the most extended family of fonts ever to have been inspired by the great punchcutter and printer who spent most of his life in Parma.

Compulsive Bodoni is the name of the project designed to communicate the Parmigiano Typographic System. It introduces the font and follows its development with a series of multidisciplinary events.
In the middle of 2010 I started taking macro photographs of original copies of Bodoni’s 1818 Manuale Tipografico. My purpose was to analyse Bodoni’s roman types in order to develop some fonts inspired by his work.

Ezra Klein:

I understand why a professional journalist like Nate Thayer would be frustrated at being asked to work for “exposure” rather than work for pay, though I think it’s unprofessional to vent that frustration by publishing the e-mails and the name of the junior editor who made the request.

(Brian Stauffer for The Washington Post/)

But behind this debate lurks an uncomfortable fact: The salaries of professional journalists are built upon our success in convincing experts of all kinds working for exposure rather than pay. Now those experts have found a way to work for exposure without going through professional journalists, creating a vast expansion in the quantity and quality of content editors can get for free.
Call it the revenge of our sources. For a very long time, we got them to work for nothing more than exposure — and sometimes, we didn’t even give them that. Now they’re getting more and more of us to do it.

Ian Tucker:

Evgeny Morozov is a Belarus-born technology writer who has held positions at Stanford and Georgetown universities in the US. His first book, The Net Delusion, argued that “Western do-gooders may have missed how [the internet]… entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it harder – not easier –to promote democracy”. It was described as “brilliant and courageous” by the New York Times. In his second book To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov critiques what he calls “solutionism” – the idea that given the right code, algorithms and robots, technology can solve all of mankind’s problems, effectively making life “frictionless” and trouble-free. Morozov argues that this drive to eradicate imperfection and make everything “efficient” shuts down other avenues of progress and leads ultimately to an algorithm-driven world where Silicon Valley, rather than elected governments, determines the shape of the future.

Some of the technologies you describe as “solutionist” many people find useful. For instance self-tracking gadgets that encourage people to exercise, to monitor their blood pressure or warn them about their driving habits and reduce their insurance premiums.

James Temple:

But for all the funding announcements, product launches, media attention and wealth creation, most of Silicon Valley doesn’t concern itself with aiming “almost ridiculously high.” It concerns itself primarily with getting people to click on ads or buy slightly better gadgets than the ones they got last year.

Time to drop the pretense

That’s fine, that’s capitalism – and these incremental improvements lead to slow productivity gains that at least quicken the pulse of economists. But maybe let’s drop the pretense that we’re curing cancer unless, you know, we’re curing cancer.
Levchin specifically took the stage that day to discuss his forthcoming book on the subject, “The Blueprint: Reviving Innovation, Rediscovering Risk and Rescuing the Free Market.” One of his co-authors was venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who joined him in the appearance.

The description for the (now very delayed) title notes: “We have become a risk-averse society, hobbled by tort laws and government regulations, short-term financial thinking, and mind-numbing complacency.”

That all sounds about right, but based on other public comments – particularly from Thiel, an outspoken libertarian – the weight of their blame seems to land on government while the grand hopes lie in “Rescuing the Free Market.” That conforms to a growing view in Silicon Valley that government is the archenemy of innovation.
But when we stick to the definition of solving the really hard problems of science and technology, the scale just as easily tips the other way.