Alex Thornburg @ Westminster Madison

Today is the first Sunday in Lent; the season of confession and reflection that walks the path of the cross. The liturgical color for Lent is purple. For Lent this year, we have chosen to explore a few of the confessions in our Book of Confessions. While we may be unfamiliar with many of these confessions, they express many of the challenges facing Christians throughout the ages. In the Presbyterian Church we call ourselves a confessional church meaning we seek to express our faith in God in particular times and in particular places. What we believe matters in times of confusion and uncertainty. While we do not often think of the Confession in this way, they do have something to say to the world and our own lives.

Our worship today focuses on the Theological Declaration of Barmen. (See insert) Using the Biblical story of Jesus temptations in the desert (the traditional story for the First Sunday in Lent), we explore the temptation to power for the church and for individuals. Our Prayer of Confession is taken from the Book of Common Worship liturgy for Ash Wednesday. We will be using a different portion of this confession throughout the season reminding ourselves of the opening action of our Lenten season. Rather than an Acclamation Hymn following and celebrating the Assurance of Pardon, we will be singing a Song of Confession reflective of the meaning of the season. A portion of the Barmen Declaration will be read in unison as our Profession of Faith.

The Sunday Morning Post:

It all happened between the ’50s and ’70s, when Shenzhen was a small fishing village. Every single dark night during that time there were many mainlanders leaving their homeland, diving into the deep and dirty Dapeng and Shenzhen bays, and swimming the deadly four-kilometre journey to Hong Kong. The years 1957, 1962, 1972 and 1979 marked the four major booms in illegal emigration to Hong Kong, as mainlanders had suffered greatly from the Cultural Revolution, which included vast famine.

According to my research and investigations, about two million people flooded into Hong Kong as illegal immigrants, often with great personal loss, and more people died on their way or were caught and repatriated.

Neither East Germans climbing the Berlin Wall nor the tens of thousands of North Koreans crossing the Yalu River to the Chinese city of Dandong could compare to the exodus from the mainland to Hong Kong. It’s an epic account of the fate of communists seeking a better life in a capitalist harbour, at a cost of life and blood. So I called it The Great Exodus to Hong Kong.

John Sharp:

With the broader availability of data from electronic health records, the secondary use of this rich clinical data presents the opportunity for data mining. However, data mining has received negative press when used by pharmaceutical companies to monitor physician prescribing patterns.

In many industries, mining of Big Data has become a profitable source for business intelligence. Everything from financial trends to social media sentiment analysis is game. With the ability to search personal data through new tools like Facebook’s Graph Search and increasingly targeted marketing based on huge databases of personal data, the concept of data mining is becoming synonymous with invading privacy.

In health care, the expanding use of EHRs creates opportunities for secondary use of health data collected at the point of care. Such data are unique in that they enable data mining of real-world clinical practice on millions of patients in large health systems. Unlike data collected in the carefully structured setting of a clinical trial, large groups of patients can be studied retrospectively as were treated for a variety of conditions.

Dan Frommer:

Tesla CEO Elon Musk shreds* the New York Times review of his Model S, using data to argue the writer is telling the wrong story.

I won’t pretend to know who’s actually right or wrong here — Tesla certainly only has an interest in telling its side of the story — but the fact that a company has the tools and distribution to quickly publish something like this today is pretty amazing. (See also, OXO’s wonderful takedown of rival Quirky.)

Even a few years ago, something like this probably would have required finding a rival newspaper — the Wall Street Journal, perhaps — to collaborate on a takedown. Or maybe an expensive full-page ad campaign in the top five papers, which would have looked defensive and seemed less convincing.

But now that every smart company has a regularly updated blog, Elon Musk has 136,000 Twitter followers, etc., brands can speak for themselves very powerfully. And if the tone is right, they don’t even look lame: Tesla actually looks pretty great right now*. The balance of power has shifted.

Laurie Burkett:

Fearful of accidentally chomping down on cardboard-stuffed dumplings or toxic chicken, Chinese consumers may soon be able to run safety tests on their food before putting it in their mouths.

According to a report from the official Xinhua news agency, scientists at the Tianjin University of Science and Technology in northern China have developed an at-home testing kit to help consumers detect more than 60 varieties of chemicals in their food.

The tests, conducted with indicator paper, let consumers know within minutes if a food sample contains harmful substances, Xinhua said, predicting the product will likely be in high demand.

Tom Foremski:

Richard Edelman, the head of the world’s largest privately held PR firm, said that the Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual global survey of 31,000 people, revealed a lack of trust for business and government that was “contagious” and spreading to other sectors.

He was speaking earlier this week at the Computer History Museum on a panel organized by the Churchill Club, and moderated by Peter Burrows, senior reporter at Bloomberg.

He said that it’s the first time that such lack of trust has become viral and it stems from the financial sector.

Jeffrey Pfeffer, co-panelist and professor at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, said, “We are all being tarred with the same brush.”

Tesla Motors. Tesla has been in a tussle with the New York Times over a recent review.

Ryan Gallagher:

A multinational security firm has secretly developed software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.

A video obtained by the Guardian reveals how an “extreme-scale analytics” system created by Raytheon, the world’s fifth largest defence contractor, can gather vast amounts of information about people from websites including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.

Raytheon says it has not sold the software – named Riot, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology – to any clients.

But the Massachusetts-based company has acknowledged the technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analysing “trillions of entities” from cyberspace.

Mark Maynard:

9. Shuman suggests that we immediately do two things as a community. Together, he says, these two things would likely only cost us about $20,000. And, if we did them, we’d be infinitely better off than every other community in the United States. First, he suggests that we create a passive web listing of every local business investment opportunity there is. Second, he says that we should strike a deal with a local accountant to help implement a self-directed IRA initiative. If we could gather 1,000 individuals, all willing to pay $100 a year to have someone manage a self-dircted IRA, he suspects that we could find an accountant willing to drop his/her rates to accommodate us. And, once we have this mechanism, we could begin moving our savings from investments in the S&P 500, into our own communities. (Self-directed IRAs are currently legal under SEC rules.) The accountant would just have to do the administrative work of facilitating the investments in these local companies. And, as he says, this could happen immediately. (He said that, if we wanted, we could also consider implementing a community portal, like those being rolled out by Mission Markets.