Om Malik:

In 1990s, we had a generally upbeat economic environment around the country and there was a sense of naive optimism around the internet. Then came the gold rush and later the malfeasance. Right now we have a country that is facing an unending economic uncertainty, especially for a large swathe of people. As a result, the Bay Area stands out and finds itself living under a microscope. There is no naive optimism; just gross entitlement and that is what’s wrong.
 
 Our industry has boom and bust cycles that are much faster that any other industry and at the same time have unsaid but distinct barriers to entry. The internet-speed cycles lead to many more startups and more people becoming millionaires faster and at a much younger age than any other industry — even the older version of the internet industry. We also forget that the same speed which thrills, also kills. The recent retrenchment of technology stocks is a good reminder that the craziness doesn’t get to mania levels anymore.

This bubble is similar to real estate brokers offering agents 120% splits.

Benjamin Mako Hill:

A few years ago, I was surprised to find out that my friend Peter Eckersley — a very privacy conscious person who is Technology Projects Director at the EFF — used Gmail. I asked him why he would willingly give Google copies of all his email. Peter pointed out that if all of your friends use Gmail, Google has your email anyway. Any time I email somebody who uses Gmail — and anytime they email me — Google has that email.
 
 Since our conversation, I have often wondered just how much of my email Google really has. This weekend, I wrote a small program to go through all the email I have kept in my personal inbox since April 2004 (when Gmail was started) to find out.
 
 One challenge with answering the question is that many people, like Peter, use Gmail to read, compose, and send email but they configure Gmail to send email from a non-gmail.com “From” address. To catch these, my program looks through each message’s headers that record which computers handled the message on its way to my server and to pick out messages that have traveled through google.com, gmail.com, or googlemail.com. Although I usually filter them, my personal mailbox contains emails sent through a number of mailing lists. Since these mailing lists often “hide” the true provenance of a message, I exclude all messages that are marked as coming from lists using the (usually invisible) “Precedence” header.

Trici Venola:

We hiked along a narrow gorge full of bushes and rocks. The ground began to change as we walked, until we were walking among great rounded humps of rock as wide as houses. “I think we’re past the really big ones,” said the German. “Hey, maybe these are the really big ones,” said Laura. “Maybe just the tops of the big ones.” The moon burned silver and the stars pounded overhead, millions in the huge dark sky glimpsed between the moonlit towers of stone. I thought of the Romans marching through here, the Persian armies, Alexander the Great, Mithridates, Hittites, Christians and Muslims and Genghis Khan; pictured the great slumbering masses of history billeted among the knobby shadows and gullies, all through the silent grasses, under the sentinel stones.

Toby Gunton:

Great swathes of brand relationships could become automated. Your energy bills and contracts, water, gas, car insurance, home insurance, bank, pension, life assurance, supermarket, home maintenance, transport solutions, IT and entertainment packages; all of these relationships could be managed by your beautiful personal OS.
 
 Brands in these categories could find themselves dealing with the digital butler (unless we, the consumer, step in and press the override button), in which case marketing in these sectors could become programmatic in the truest sense.

Brian Krebs:

Target wants you to know that you can trust it again. Nearly seven months after the second biggest retailer in America ignored multiple alarm bells, allowing thieves to virtually hijack the cash registers at some 1,800 stores and siphon at least 40m credit and debit card records plus contact info for more than 70m customers, CEO Gregg Steinhafel is out, and the company has pledged to spend $100m upgrading the security of its checkout system.
 
 But Monday’s mea culpa papers over problems still endemic throughout the American retail industry: an over-reliance on in-store technology rather than cybersecurity experts in the boardroom, and a tendency to underestimate the lengths to which bad guys will go to steal anything that isn’t properly nailed down.

James Downer:

The US dollar black market doesn’t just thrive in Buenos Aires, it’s published in the paper every morning. Swinging by one of the city’s newsstands, you’ll find the official peso to dollar rates published next to the ‘dólar blue’ rates at the top of the morning edition of La Nacion, and if you walk downtown to Calle Florida, the arbolitos that stand planted on the busy commercial street greet any foreigner they see with barks for “Cambio! Cambio! Cambio!” Currency restrictions have gotten more stringent in Argentina in recent years as the government struggles to prop up confidence in the peso by restricting the dollar. The restrictions have held the official rate down to around 8 to 1, but the blue rate at around 10 to 1 is so favorable that dollars determine tourism prices and denominate everything from technology purchases to property.

Katie Collins:

Bruce Hellman is determined to move away from a healthcare system in which every appointment begins with “a blank picture where clinicians have no insight on how their patients are doing”.
 
 He is, he said at Wired Health today, astounded that when he goes to an ecommerce site it will know all about how he has been spending his money since his last visit; when he visits his GP after a six-month break, they will have practically nothing on him and what he has been doing during that time.

Kevin Fitchard:

There was only one problem. The data they found was not what what they expected to find.
 
 After aggregating menu data for more than a year, Food Genius wasn’t able to find any big nationwide food or eating trends. No matter what it looked at – the appearance of kale on the menu, the number of restaurants serving carnitas tacos – Food Genius was just seeing big flat lines across its graphs. The problem, according CEO and co-founder Justin Massa, was that, averaged out across the country, our eating patterns stayed static or rose and fell only incrementally quarter to quarter, year to year.

W Wayt Gibbs:

He has discovered an algorithm, based on the methylation status of a set of these genomic positions, that provides a remarkably accurate age estimate — not of the cells, but of the person the cells inhabit. White blood cells, for example, which may be just a few days or weeks old, will carry the signature of the 50-year-old donor they came from, plus or minus a few years. The same is true for DNA extracted from a cheek swab, the brain, the colon and numerous other organs. This sets the method apart from tests that rely on biomarkers of age that work in only one or two tissues, including the gold-standard dating procedure, aspartic acid racemization, which analyses proteins that are locked away for a lifetime in tooth or bone.
 
 “I wanted to develop a method that would work in many or most tissues. It was a very risky project,” Horvath says. But now the gamble seems to be paying off. By the time his findings were finally published last year1, the clock’s median error was 3.6 years, meaning that it could guess the age of half the donors to within 43 months for a broad selection of tissues. That accuracy improves to 2.7 years for saliva alone, 1.9 years for certain types of white blood cell and 1.5 years for the brain cortex. The clock shows stem cells removed from embryos to be extremely young and the brains of centenarians to be about 100.

Padraic Flanagan:

It’s all academic for now anyway, they say, because the third edition of the famous dictionary, estimated to fill 40 volumes, is running at least 20 years behind schedule.
 
 Michael Proffitt, the OED’s first new chief editor for 20 years, said the mammoth masterpiece is facing delays because “information overload” from the internet is slowing his compilers.
 
 His team of 70 philologists, including lexicographers, etymologists and pronunciation experts, has been working on the latest version, known as OED3, for the past 20 years.
 
 Michael Proffitt revealed to Country Life magazine that the next edition will not be completed until 2034, and likely only to be offered in an online form because of its gargantuan size.
 
 “A lot of the first principles of the OED stand firm, but how it manifests has to change, and how it reaches people has to change,” said the 48-year-old Edinburgh-born editor.
 
 Work on the new version, currently numbering 800,000 words, has been going on since 1994. The first edition, mooted in 1858 with completion expected in 10 years, took 70 years.
 
 “Although the internet has made access easier,” said Mr Proffitt, “it’s also created the dilemma of information overload.