Evgeny Morozov:

Let’s give credit where it is due: Google is not hiding its revolutionary ambitions. As its co-founder Larry Page put it in 2004, eventually its search function “will be included in people’s brains” so that “when you think about something and don’t really know much about it, you will automatically get information”.

Science fiction? The implant is a rhetorical flourish but Mr Page’s utopian project is not a distant dream. In reality, the implant does not have be connected to our brains. We carry it in our pockets – it’s called a smartphone.

So long as Google can interpret – and predict – our intentions, Mr Page’s vision of a continuous and frictionless information supply could be fulfilled. However, to realise this vision, Google needs a wealth of data about us. Knowing what we search for helps – but so does knowing about our movements, our surroundings, our daily routines and our favourite cat videos.

Larry Lessig:

We Americans are disgusted with our government. We ranked fixing “corruption in Washington” number 2 on Gallup’s poll of top presidential priorities in 2012. Yet Washington doesn’t seem to care. Neither President Barack Obama or Mitt Romney even mentioned “corruption” as an issue that their administration would address. And it will take a lot more work by us to get them to pay attention.

The first step, however, is to figure out how best to talk about the problem. People say the problem is “money in politics.” That we need to “get money out.” That “money is not speech.” That “corporations are not people.”

These are slogans, and they’re quite effective at rallying at least some of us to the cause. But as slogans, they’re likely to turn off most to the right of America’s center. And in any case, they don’t quite capture what’s gone wrong with our political system today. They therefore don’t point us to a plausible solution to the problem of our political system today.

So in my TED talk, I created Lesterland: Imagine a country like the United States, with just as many “Lesters” as the United States (about 150,000 out of a population of more than 300 million, or about 0.05%). And imagine those Lesters have a very special power: Each election cycle has two elections. In one, the general election, all citizens get to vote. In the other, the “Lester election,” only “Lesters” get to vote.

James Hamilton:

“Peak oil is dead,” Rob Wile declared last week. Colin Sullivan says it has “gone the way of the Flat Earth Society”, writing

Those behind the theory appear to have been dead wrong, at least in terms of when the peak would hit, having not anticipated the rapid shift in technology that led to exploding oil and natural gas production in new plays and areas long since dismissed as dried up.

These comments inspired me to revisit some of the predictions made in 2005 that received a lot of attention at the time, and take a look at what’s actually happened since then.

Here’s how Boone Pickens saw the world in a speech given May 3, 2005:

Jason Dortier:

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) are recruiting a million participants to join a decade long heart health study. The enabling factor? Smartphones. It’s a great example of information technology bleeding into other fields and speeding their progress. If all goes to plan, the UCSF study (dubbed Health eHeart) will be the broadest such study ever completed.

In comparison, the much lauded Framingham Heart Study, initiated in 1948, recruited and studied 15,000 participants over three generations. The Framingham study outlined today’s familiar set of heart risks that doctors use to evaluate patients and prescribe lifestyle changes—high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol, smoking, obesity, diabetes, stress, and physical inactivity.

The discovery and subsequent mediation of these risk factors is largely credited with a 75% decline in mortality rates due to heart-related disease in the last half century. See Dr. Hans Diehl discuss how heart disease was shown to be more of a lifestyle illness than a genetic illness by World War II and the Framingham study below:

:

If you thought personalized advertising based on your Facebook status updates, Gmail content or online browsing behavior was creepy, just you wait. The era of genetic-based advertising is coming, and it could be just as profitable.

“Today, it’s such a niche market, but there’s tremendous growth opportunities there,” said geneticist Michael Schatz of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. “In the endgame, it’s certain [genetics is] going to become one of the factors that big retailers would consider, but I think that’s pretty far off.”

Maybe not so far off.

Minneapolis-based startup Miinome is already building a platform that will help consumers control what offers they get from retailers based on their genetic makeup, and to possibly cash in on the value of their DNA by selling the data back to marketers and researchers.

“We believe we can make your genetic information useful every day, not just when you’re sick,” said Miinome CEO Paul Saarinen. “We’re the first member-controlled, portable human genomics marketplace.” Through an open API, Miinome will combine genetic and environmental data mined from social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and run that through their proprietary algorithm to come up with a profile of you that’s richer than anything that exists on the internet today.

A beautiful morning at Laodicea on the Lycus.

Matt Taibbi:

Start with the most recent news: last week, Sanders announced plans to introduce an interesting new bill, one that’s a direct response to comments made recently by the likes of Eric Holder about the difficulty in prosecuting big banks. Holder said some institutions have grown so large that prosecuting its executives may have a “negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.”

This was an extraordinary statement to come out of the mouth of the Attorney General – essentially announcing in advance a disinclination to prosecute a whole class of people. It’s Minority Report in reverse – pre-noncrime. What was even more bizarre was that this wasn’t an inadvertent comment or a slip of the tongue, it was absolutely consistent with comments made by other DOJ officials late last year after the slap-on-the-wrist HSBC (money-laundering) and UBS (rate-fixing) settlements. Worse, after Holder and other prosecutorial pushovers like Lanny Breuer made these comments, there was utter silence from the White House, making it crystal clear that this is a coordinated policy.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes:

The era where the PC is dominant in IT is rapidly coming to a close as we move towards a future dominated by post-PC devices such as smartphones and tablets, and if your business is reliant on the PC to keep the dollars flowing in then you’d better start working on “Plan B.”

The message that the era of the PC is coming to a close comes from a company at the heart of the industry – Dell.

In a proxy statement submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission relating to the company’s plans to go private, the company outlines, in very clear language, that the PC train has hit the buffers.

Outlines are the “various risks and uncertainties related to continued ownership of Common Stock,” and it makes scary reading for anyone operating within the industry, or who holds stock in the company. These are listed as:

“… decreasing revenues in the market for desktop and notebook PCs and the significant uncertainties as to whether, or when, this decrease will end…”
“…the overall difficulty of predicting the market for PCs, as evidenced by the significant revisions in industry forecasts among industry experts and analysts over the past year…”
“…the ongoing downward pricing pressure and trend towards commoditization in the desktop and notebook personal computer market…”

Justin Jin:

Inside the claustrophobic confines of a shipping container erected in the middle of an icy nowhere, a group of Russians wait out another Arctic storm. Anton bakes blinis. Andrei watches a horror movie for the umpteenth time. Alexei tries to craft a toothpaste holder from an empty tin can. Lisa the dog, who finds company among the 100 men in Camp No2, curls up farthest away from the drafty door.

The engineers gathered on this desolate patch of Russian tundra have been hired by a geo-exploration company to look for oil deep below the permafrost. I am waiting out the battering winds with them, to document the international race to secure Arctic resources.

I have made six trips over three years to the Russian Arctic, a 7,000-kilometre-long region stretching atop the planet from Finland to Alaska, upon which Moscow bureaucrats have bestowed the name “Zone of Absolute Discomfort”. The icy hinterland is wretched to live in, but just hospitable enough to allow for the extraction of billions of tonnes of resources trapped beneath the permafrost.

Here, three contrasting ways of life, representing three centuries of Russian history, simultaneously tap the Earth’s resources amid its harshest conditions: indigenous reindeer herders known as Nenets; descendants of former Soviet prisoners; and energy-company men seeking oil and natural gas.