Get ready for the global brain. That was the grand finale of a presentation on the next generation of the Internet I heard last week from Yuri Milner. G-8 leaders had a preview of Milner’s predictions a few months earlier, when he was among the technology savants invited to brief the world’s most powerful politicians in Deauville, France.
Milner is the technology guru most of us have never heard of. He was an early outside investor in Facebook, sinking $200 million in the company in 2009 for a 1.96 percent stake, a decision that was widely derided as crazy at the time. He was also early to spot the potential of Zynga, the gaming company, and of Groupon, the daily deals site.His investing savvy propelled Milner this year onto the Forbes Rich List, with an estimated net worth of $1 billion. One reason his is not yet a household name is that he does his tech spotting from Moscow, not a city most of us look to for innovative economic ideas.
Milner was speaking in the Ukranian city of Yalta, at the annual mini-Davos hosted by the Ukrainian pipes baron and art collector Victor Pinchuk (disclosure — I moderated at the event). What was striking about Milner’s remarks was how sharply his tone differed from that of the other participants.
Next Stop Beaujolais: A Metro Map of French Wines
Wine maps are appreciated mainly by the select few who are both cartophiles and oenophiles. Those who are either or neither face a formidable obstacle to cartographic enjoyment, inherent in viticulture: wine regions are a mess to map.
In wine-making, the hyperlocal is paramount. Soil type and microclimate, production and processing methods, taste and reputation – not least the type of grapes involved – all help explain the widely differing oenological appreciations of relatively small, often adjacent plots of land.
This is why traditional wine cartography resembles a map of rampant feudalism, with a confusing jumble of tiny dominions ineffectually jostling for the attention of the map reader.
Rite Aid rolls out in-store virtual doctor visits
One of the nation’s leading drug store chains, Rite Aid, has begun rolling out online physician chat rooms in its stores, allowing customers to participate in virtual face-to-face consultations prior to purchases.
Rite Aid today said it worked with healthcare provider OptumHealth to introduce its NowClinic Online Care services, which are currently available at pharmacies in the Detroit area.
The NowClinic offers Rite Aid customers real-time access to medical information and resources from doctors and OptumHealth nurses. Rite Aid said it is the first to provide a virtual clinic in a retail pharmacy setting.
Currently, conversations with nurses are free and a 10-minute consultation with a doctor is $45.
Patenting the Ponzi: the extraordinary growth of Ponzi schemes
“Two world poker champions and other leaders of one of the largest internet card gaming sites turned the company into a massive Ponzi scheme, wrongly taking out more than $440m from player accounts, US officials alleged on Tuesday.”
Office of Charles Ponzi & Sons:
“Mr Ponzi, have you seen what the US Justice Department is saying about this poker website?”
(Sighs) “Don’t tell me, Massimo: they say it’s a Ponzi scheme?”
“You’ve got it in one, Mr Ponzi.”
Was Julian Assange Right About Facebook?
OK, that headline is probably over the top, but after reading Dave Winer and Nik Cubrilovic’s warnings this past weekend about Facebook’s new “frictionless sharing” system, I was left wondering if Julian Assange of WikiLeaks wasn’t on to something when he said that “Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented.”
Assange was talking about how Facebook collects information that people actively share about their relationships with each other (thus making such data prey to US intelligence prying), whereas Winer is raising the alarm about Facebook’s new policy of proactively sharing information about what websites people are visiting, without them even affirmatively entering any kind of data onto their Facebook page. Winer offers this hypothetical scenario:
Geocities Archive Data Turned Into a Stunning Digital City [VIDEO]
The Deleted City from deletedcity on Vimeo.
via Stan Schroeder.
The Ten Commandments of the American Religion
If I stand in the center of Times Square New York City and said something like “Moses didn’t part the Red Sea” or “Jesus never existed” everyone would just keep walking around me, ignoring what I said, etc. Whatever, they would be thinking, I have things to do, very important things that have to get done. And this guy is clearly crazy so not worth my time.
But if I stood there and said, “going to college is the worst sin you can force your kids to commit”, or “you should never vote again” or “World War II was not a holy war” or “never own a home again”, I would probably be lynched on the spot.
The American Religion is a fickle and false religion. Used to replace the ideologies we (a country of immigrants) escaped from with tenets that don’t withstand the test of time. With random high priests lurking all over the Internet, ready to pounce. Below are some of the tenets of the American Religion. If you think there are more, list them in the comments.
Are There Too Many Beautiful Women and Powerful Men In The World?
If you have a few minutes and three buckets try this experiment. Fill one bucket with ice-cold water, another bucket with room temperature water and the third bucket with hot water. Then, place one hand in the cold bucket and your other hand in the hot bucket. Give it a few minutes and then put both hands in the room temperature bucket. This is a harmless and fun way to confuse your brain. On one hand (pun intended) you’ll perceive the water as being cold and on the other hand (again, pun intended) you’ll perceive the water as being warm. The reason is obvious – we perceive the room temperature water relatively.
Turns out that the same is true when it comes to how we assess physical attractiveness. And that’s what I want to talk about here.
In a series of studies done back in the 1980s, Douglas Kenrick and Sara Gutierres asked participants to judge average-looking women after being exposed to pictures of other women. Here was the catch: for half of the participants the other women were unusually beautiful and for the other half the other women were average looking. They found that the participants who were exposed to unusually beautiful women judged the average-looking women “significantly uglier.” In other words, the knock-out stole the show.
Duluth City Hall Panoramic Image
Tap or click to view a full screen panoramic image.
Holders of Sovereign Debt
Here’s a great chart just released by the International Monetary Fund. Note that almost half — 47 percent – of the US$14.7 trillion U.S. federal government debt is held by the Federal Reserve and the government itself, such as the Social Security trust fund. Add to that the 22 percent foreign official holdings (mainly central banks) and almost 70 percent of the debt of the U.S. government is held by non-market/non-profit oriented investors. Stunning!