TED: How Algorithms Shape Our World

 

Kevin Slavin argues that we're living in a world designed for -- and increasingly controlled by -- algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. And he warns that we are writing code we can't understand, with implications we can't control.

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Cosmic Bling

by Mark Brown

An international team of astronomers, led by Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology professor Matthew Bailes, has discovered a planet made of diamond crystals, in our own Milky Way galaxy.

The planet is relatively small at around 60,000 km in diameter (still, it’s five times the size of Earth). But despite its diminutive stature, this crystal space rock has more mass than the solar system’s gas giant Jupiter.

Radio telescope data shows that it orbits its star at a distance of 600,000 km, making years on planet diamond just two hours long. Any closer and it would be ripped to shreds by the star’s gravitational tug. Putting together its immense mass and close orbit, researchers can reveal the planet’s unique makeup.

It’s “likely to be largely carbon and oxygen,” said Michael Keith, one of the research team members, in a press release. Lighter elements, “like hydrogen and helium would be too big to fit the measured orbiting times”. The object’s density means that the material is certain to be crystalline, meaning a large part of the planet may be similar to a diamond.

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Raphael Saadiq

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Creation Myth

 

Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation

by Malcolm Gladwell

In late 1979, a twenty-four-year-old entrepreneur paid a visit to a research center in Silicon Valley called Xerox PARC. He was the co-founder of a small computer startup down the road, in Cupertino. His name was Steve Jobs.

Xerox PARC was the innovation arm of the Xerox Corporation. It was, and remains, on Coyote Hill Road, in Palo Alto, nestled in the foothills on the edge of town, in a long, low concrete building, with enormous terraces looking out over the jewels of Silicon Valley. To the northwest was Stanford University’s Hoover Tower. To the north was Hewlett-Packard’s sprawling campus. All around were scores of the other chip designers, software firms, venture capitalists, and hardware-makers. A visitor to PARC, taking in that view, could easily imagine that it was the computer world’s castle, lording over the valley below—and, at the time, this wasn’t far from the truth. In 1970, Xerox had assembled the world’s greatest computer engineers and programmers, and for the next ten years they had an unparalleled run of innovation and invention. If you were obsessed with the future in the seventies, you were obsessed with Xerox PARC—which was why the young Steve Jobs had driven to Coyote Hill Road.

Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if PARC would “open its kimono.” A lot of haggling ensued. Jobs was the fox, after all, and PARC was the henhouse. What would he be allowed to see? What wouldn’t he be allowed to see? Some at PARC thought that the whole idea was lunacy, but, in the end, Xerox went ahead with it. One PARC scientist recalls Jobs as “rambunctious”—a fresh-cheeked, caffeinated version of today’s austere digital emperor. He was given a couple of tours, and he ended up standing in front of a Xerox Alto, PARC’s prized personal computer.

An engineer named Larry Tesler conducted the demonstration. He moved the cursor across the screen with the aid of a “mouse.” Directing a conventional computer, in those days, meant typing in a command on the keyboard. Tesler just clicked on one of the icons on the screen. He opened and closed “windows,” deftly moving from one task to another. He wrote on an elegant word-processing program, and exchanged e-mails with other people at PARC, on the world’s first Ethernet network. Jobs had come with one of his software engineers, Bill Atkinson, and Atkinson moved in as close as he could, his nose almost touching the screen. “Jobs was pacing around the room, acting up the whole time,” Tesler recalled. “He was very excited. Then, when he began seeing the things I could do onscreen, he watched for about a minute and started jumping around the room, shouting, ‘Why aren’t you doing anything with this? This is the greatest thing. This is revolutionary!’ ”

Xerox began selling a successor to the Alto in 1981. It was slow and underpowered—and Xerox ultimately withdrew from personal computers altogether. Jobs, meanwhile, raced back to Apple, and demanded that the team working on the company’s next generation of personal computers change course. He wanted menus on the screen. He wanted windows. He wanted a mouse. The result was the Macintosh, perhaps the most famous product in the history of Silicon Valley.

“If Xerox had known what it had and had taken advantage of its real opportunities,” Jobs said, years later, “it could have been as big as I.B.M. plus Microsoft plus Xerox combined—and the largest high-technology company in the world.”

This is the legend of Xerox PARC. Jobs is the Biblical Jacob and Xerox is Esau, squandering his birthright for a pittance. In the past thirty years, the legend has been vindicated by history. Xerox, once the darling of the American high-technology community, slipped from its former dominance. Apple is now ascendant, and the demonstration in that room in Palo Alto has come to symbolize the vision and ruthlessness that separate true innovators from also-rans. As with all legends, however, the truth is a bit more complicated.

After Jobs returned from PARC, he met with a man named Dean Hovey, who was one of the founders of the industrial-design firm that would become known as IDEO. “Jobs went to Xerox PARC on a Wednesday or a Thursday, and I saw him on the Friday afternoon,” Hovey recalled. “I had a series of ideas that I wanted to bounce off him, and I barely got two words out of my mouth when he said, ‘No, no, no, you’ve got to do a mouse.’ I was, like, ‘What’s a mouse?’ I didn’t have a clue. So he explains it, and he says, ‘You know, [the Xerox mouse] is a mouse that cost three hundred dollars to build and it breaks within two weeks. Here’s your design spec: Our mouse needs to be manufacturable for less than fifteen bucks. It needs to not fail for a couple of years, and I want to be able to use it on Formica and my bluejeans.’ From that meeting, I went to Walgreens, which is still there, at the corner of Grant and El Camino in Mountain View, and I wandered around and bought all the underarm deodorants that I could find, because they had that ball in them. I bought a butter dish. That was the beginnings of the mouse.”

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Steve Jobs: The Insanely Great Comeback Kid

by Andrew Leonard

I've never seen a living man receive as many obituaries as Steve Jobs has in the last 24 hours, but I guess it's understandable. The first line of his letter to the "Apple Community" spells it out: "I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple''s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come." Those words are a sucker punch to the communal solar plexus -- it's impossible to imagine anything other than severe illness that would impel Jobs to step down from running the show -- except maybe a palace coup. And we've already been there, done that. There will be no reruns. Apple is currently the most successful and influential company on the planet -- nobody, anywhere, questions the quality of his leadership.

And that's what's so amazing about the Steve Jobs story. It's easy enough to rhapsodize over Jobs' incredible track record -- his accomplishments include the first great personal computer, the transformation of both the music and the telephone business, and the creation of one of the greatest movie-making studios of our time. Just writing that sentence is breathtaking. We will not see its like again. But for me, Jobs' career signifies something more primal -- his comeback saga is a story of redemption, a fantasy epic in which a great king is toppled, but through force of will and grit and brilliance fights his way all the way back to the throne, and inaugurates an even greater empire. It's hard to think of parallels. Mohammed Ali, maybe.

America loves underdogs and comeback kids and winners. Jobs' career arc fills all of those bills. You don't have to be a Windows guy or a Mac guy to appreciate this. All you have to do is love a great story. And the story of how Jobs got pushed out of Apple by a man he personally hand-picked to help run his company, how the company teetered perilously close to bankruptcy, and how Jobs came back to lead Apple to unthinkable success is one hell of an insanely great yarn.

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The World's Best Travel Book

"The Way of the World" is a 1950s travelogue of a trip that Nicolas Bouvier and Thierry Vernet took from Geneva to the Khyber Pass in their faithful FIAT Topolino. Bouvier’s account is now famous amongst travel literature lovers and is generally considered to be the best travel book ever written.

by Henri Lagouleme

There is plenty of competition for the title of best ever travel book: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts; A.W. Kinglake’s Eothen; Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia or Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana have all been cited as the very best of the genre at one time or another. Travel Writing has attracted many a famous name but being a genius of fiction is certainly no guarantee of accomplishment as Henry James’s (A Little Tour in France) or Dostoyevsky’s (Winter Notes on Summer Impressions) incursions into the field make clear. Travel writing is an art of its own and requires specific gifts, imagination is one of them but force and depth of character are probably the key to success – which is where Nicolas Bouvier beats them all hands down.

Bouvier outlines the nature of the trip: “We denied ourselves every luxury except one, that of being slow.” He and Vernet did exactly that, setting off at a leisurely pace with very little money –only enough for a few months – thus throwing themselves into the hands of fate. Bouvier and Vernet were no trailblazers, neither were they Jack Kerouacs out for “kicks”. “Taking your time is the best way not to lose it”, Bouvier advises. They were out for a slow and full immersion into the whole business of travelling and discovery: “Travel provides occasions for shaking oneself up but not, as people believe, freedom.” And “Travelling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you—or unmaking you.”

The success of the book is mainly due to Bouvier’s literary style. He is disarmingly humane and poetic and comes across as the antithesis to the presumptuous traveller: strangely lovable, completely without guile and very smart.

He treats everyone he meets as an equal, from down-and-out Serbian artisans, to bored border guards, to a Texan consultant pulling his hair out in Tabriz, and restaurant owners with colourful pasts in Quetta, gypsies, Iranian long-distance lorry drivers and the doctors he fortuitously meets along the way who put him back together again. Bouvier’s intelligence is profound and above all generous and thoughtful. Despite throwing his life to the four winds on this slightly madcap escapade, there is something sensible about the man – his critical eye never abandons him.

Bouvier and Thierry Vernet set off from former Yugoslavia in 1953, determined to reach Kabul. They believed, as everyone does, that Kabul was at the ends of the earth, only to discover that – as King Babur (the 15th century founder of the Mogul dynasty in India) reminds us in his memoirs – Kabul is actually the centre of the earth. Bouvier does not disagree – quoting Babur at length.

Passion Pit

[ed.  It's interesting sometimes to glance at the comments sections of these videos.  I guess hipsters are down these days (if it's even possible to come up with a definitive explanation of what a hipster is... music, wise).  I guess I post for hipsters, fossils, soul surfers, jazzers, rockers, funkmeisters, grassers, clubbers, blues dudes and anyone else that just finds all kinds of music interesting.]

Adventures in Indiana State Fair Food 2011

by Aaron Carroll

That’s a doughnut burger. They take a Krispy Kreme and put it on the griddle. Then they take a bacon cheeseburger and put it on top. No veggies for us. Of course, it’s topped with another Krispy Kreme. Noah, who has the most discriminating palate in the family, loved this. Aimee will deny liking this, but she darn well tried it. What makes the Indiana State Fair better than any other food adventure you can think of, though, is that the doughnut burger was pretty much the healthiest thing offered at the grill.

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John Coltrane

This Wine Goes Well With Fish

by Alan Tardi

Brilliant ideas sometimes arise out of pure necessity. Consider Piero Lugano, 63, the suntanned artist-turned-wine-merchant who opened a shop called Bisson in this town on the Italian Riviera in 1978.

Not content merely to sell wine, he soon began making it. Ten years ago he decided to try producing sparkling wine from indigenous varieties grown in vineyards overlooking the Golfo Paradiso on the Mediterranean.

But he immediately encountered a problem: there was simply no space in his already cramped shop and winery to carry out the aging required to make a bottle-fermented sparkling wine in the classic method of Champagne. Then, as he recalled recently, “a light bulb went on in my head: I thought, why not put the wine under the sea?”

This might seem logical to someone like Mr. Lugano who has long struggled to reconcile his twin passions for vine and sea. To most everyone else, the idea of making wine underwater might seem a bit unusual.

But Mr. Lugano makes an interesting argument: “It’s better than even the best underground cellar, especially for sparkling wine. The temperature is perfect, there’s no light, the water prevents even the slightest bit of air from getting in, and the constant counterpressure keeps the bubbles bubbly. Moreover, the underwater currents act like a crib, gently rocking the bottles and keeping the lees moving through the wine.” (The lees refer to yeast particles.)

It’s quite a creative solution to a space problem. But Italy is infamous for its labyrinthine bureaucracy. And the place he wanted to put the wine happened to be in the tightly controlled waters of a national marine preserve, the Area Marina Protetta di Portofino. So the odds would seem overwhelmingly against such a project.

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Lovelorn in a Facebook Age

  
Obsessing After the Loss of a Romantic Partner Is Akin to Craving Cocaine

by Elizabeth Bernstein

I woke up one day last week to an anguished email from a friend whose girlfriend had just broken up with him. He had an urgent question: How could he take his mind off her so that he wouldn't call or text her?

I was momentarily stumped. What advice did I have for coping with one of life's worst experiences—losing a romantic partner? What would help him channel his energy into positive, productive activities?

It's no secret that when we lose a lover, we tend to lose our willpower. Suddenly, despite our best intentions, we fall prey to obsessive thoughts ("What did I do wrong?"), feelings ("I'll be alone forever") and actions (calling, emailing, texting).

I reflected on the advice I got after a major breakup almost two years ago. "Literature, my dear, literature… " began one email from a good friend. My mother reminded me to listen to music because "it soothes the soul." Others suggested exercise, volunteer work, travel. All excellent advice—and difficult to follow when you are in pain.

"It's not a heartbroken thing, it's a brain-broken thing," says Marianne Legato, a cardiologist and founder of the Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine at Columbia University.

Therapists say the emotional stages after a breakup parallel the well-known stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, rebuilding. In general, the more meaningful the relationship, the longer it will take to move through the stages after a breakup. Figure a couple months for a short relationship, six months to a year for one that lasted a few years, and two to three years to recover after a long-term marriage, says Tina B. Tessina, a marriage and family therapist in Long Beach, Calif.

In the age of smartphones and iPads, though, it's easy to try to hang on, simply by peeking at your ex's Facebook page or Twitter feed. Did your former flame call? Pretend you're just checking the time on your phone. Is he still ignoring you? Send a quick text. What we're looking for when we engage in obsessive behavior like this is the dopamine fix that comes when we hear back from the object of our obsession. "It's like we have a cocaine craving," says Dr. Legato.

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Case History Of A Wikipedia Page: Nabokov’s 'Lolita'

by Emily Morris

Wikipedia has an article on almost every subject—including, it turns out, one on how to write "the perfect Wikipedia article." The guidelines run through a list of the attributes such an article would have—e.g., "[i]s precise and explicit," "[i]s well-documented," "[i]s engaging"—before ending on a cautionary note: The perfect Wikipedia article is, by virtue of the collaborative editing process that creates it, "not attainable": "Editing may bring an article closer to perfection, but ultimately, perfection means different things to different editors." And as editors pursue perfection, they also must keep in mind another essential quality of a good Wikipedia entry: neutrality. That is, no matter how controversial a topic, an article must present "competing views on controversies logically and fairly, and pointing out all sides without favoring particular viewpoints."

As a member of the Arbitration Committee, Ira Matetsky settles the kinds of editorial disputes that controversial articles tend to incite. In a series of thoughtful guest posts on The Volokh Conspiracy, Matetsky explained some of the mechanics behind the editorial process. He noted that, generally, while “articles on non-contentious topics are usually accurate; articles on highly contentious articles are usually accurate on basic facts, but can be subject to bias and dispute with respect to the matters in controversy.” As a way of investigating Matetsky's point (and with Wikipedia editathons making news), we thought we'd chart the history of a single Wiki entry by using that nifty "View History" button. And what's a page that's constantly being edited, has as its subject a work of art with an, ahem, unconventional sense of morality, and is therefore constantly subjected to the editing whims of people with strong opinions, moral or otherwise? She goes by many names, but on my greasy MacBook Pro screen, she is always "Lolita."

Since 2001, the Wikipedia entry on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita has been edited 2,303 times. It's a popular entry, too: of approximately 750,000 Wiki articles out there, it ranks at 2,075 in traffic.

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Carlos Dugos
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In Defense of Distraction

[ed.  Interesting article on the benefits of focusing, and unfocusing.]

by Sam Anderson

I.  The Poverty of Attention

I’m going to pause here, right at the beginning of my riveting article about attention, and ask you to please get all of your precious 21st-century distractions out of your system now. Check the score of the Mets game; text your sister that pun you just thought of about her roommate’s new pet lizard (“iguana hold yr hand LOL get it like Beatles”); refresh your work e-mail, your home e-mail, your school e-mail; upload pictures of yourself reading this paragraph to your “me reading magazine articles” Flickr photostream; and alert the fellow citizens of whatever Twittertopia you happen to frequent that you will be suspending your digital presence for the next twenty minutes or so (I know that seems drastic: Tell them you’re having an appendectomy or something and are about to lose consciousness). Good. Now: Count your breaths. Close your eyes. Do whatever it takes to get all of your neurons lined up in one direction. Above all, resist the urge to fixate on the picture, right over there, of that weird scrambled guy typing. Do not speculate on his ethnicity (German-Venezuelan?) or his backstory (Witness Protection Program?) or the size of his monitor. Go ahead and cover him with your hand if you need to. There. Doesn’t that feel better? Now it’s just you and me, tucked like fourteenth-century Zen masters into this sweet little nook of pure mental focus. (Seriously, stop looking at him. I’m over here.)

Over the last several years, the problem of attention has migrated right into the center of our cultural attention. We hunt it in neurology labs, lament its decline on op-ed pages, fetishize it in grassroots quality-of-life movements, diagnose its absence in more and more of our children every year, cultivate it in yoga class twice a week, harness it as the engine of self-help empires, and pump it up to superhuman levels with drugs originally intended to treat Alzheimer’s and narcolepsy. Everyone still pays some form of attention all the time, of course—it’s basically impossible for humans not to—but the currency in which we pay it, and the goods we get in exchange, have changed dramatically.

Back in 1971, when the web was still twenty years off and the smallest computers were the size of delivery vans, before the founders of Google had even managed to get themselves born, the polymath economist Herbert A. Simon wrote maybe the most concise possible description of our modern struggle: “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” As beneficiaries of the greatest information boom in the history of the world, we are suffering, by Simon’s logic, a correspondingly serious poverty of attention...

This is troubling news, obviously, for a culture of BlackBerrys and news crawls and Firefox tabs—tools that, critics argue, force us all into a kind of elective ADHD. The tech theorist Linda Stone famously coined the phrase “continuous partial attention” to describe our newly frazzled state of mind. American office workers don’t stick with any single task for more than a few minutes at a time; if left uninterrupted, they will most likely interrupt themselves. Since every interruption costs around 25 minutes of productivity, we spend nearly a third of our day recovering from them. We keep an average of eight windows open on our computer screens at one time and skip between them every twenty seconds. When we read online, we hardly even read at all—our eyes run down the page in an F pattern, scanning for keywords. When you add up all the leaks from these constant little switches, soon you’re hemorrhaging a dangerous amount of mental power. People who frequently check their e-mail have tested as less intelligent than people who are actually high on marijuana. Meyer guesses that the damage will take decades to understand, let alone fix. If Einstein were alive today, he says, he’d probably be forced to multitask so relentlessly in the Swiss patent office that he’d never get a chance to work out the theory of relativity.

I’m not ready to blame my restless attention entirely on a faulty willpower. Some of it is pure impersonal behaviorism. The Internet is basically a Skinner box engineered to tap right into our deepest mechanisms of addiction. As B. F. Skinner’s army of lever-pressing rats and pigeons taught us, the most irresistible reward schedule is not, counterintuitively, the one in which we’re rewarded constantly but something called “variable ratio schedule,” in which the rewards arrive at random. And that randomness is practically the Internet’s defining feature: It dispenses its never-ending little shots of positivity—a life-changing e-mail here, a funny YouTube video there—in gloriously unpredictable cycles. It seems unrealistic to expect people to spend all day clicking reward bars—searching the web, scanning the relevant blogs, checking e-mail to see if a co-worker has updated a project—and then just leave those distractions behind, as soon as they’re not strictly required, to engage in “healthy” things like books and ab crunches and undistracted deep conversations with neighbors. It would be like requiring employees to take a few hits of opium throughout the day, then being surprised when it becomes a problem. Last year, an editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry raised the prospect of adding “Internet addiction” to the DSM, which would make it a disorder to be taken as seriously as schizophrenia.

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The Billionaire King of Techtopia

Peter Thiel rose to fame by launching PayPal and funding a little upstart called Facebook. You'll find his fingerprints on—and his seed money in—everything from DNA manipulation to Hollywood movies along with any Silicon Valley enterprise worth knowing about. Now the 43-year-old gay libertarian is embarking on his most ambitious venture: a start-up country on the open ocean that will be governed by his Ayn Rand—inspired ideology. Will it be Thiel's crowing achievement or the biggest bust since Waterworld

by Jonathan Miles

When Peter Thiel ventures outside for a run, typically in the early-early morning, when the fog drifts low and slow into the San Francisco Bay, he's often drawn to what the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti called "the end of land and land of beginning." That means the San Francisco waterfront—especially the one-and-a-half-mile stretch of pathway hugging the marshy shoreline from Crissy Field to the base of the Golden Gate Bridge. Aesthetically, the appeal is obvious—a postcard view of the bridge and the bay, the lapping tidal rhythm, that sort of thing—but for Thiel, a 43-year-old investor and entrepreneur whose knack for anticipating the next big thing has yielded him a $1.5 billion fortune and an iconic, even delphic status in Silicon Valley, there's a symbolic angle as well. This waterline is precisely where the Western frontier ended, where unlimited opportunity finally hit its limit. It's also where, if Thiel is betting correctly, the next—and most audacious—frontier begins.

Thiel spends a lot of time thinking about frontiers. "Way more than is healthy," he admits. Not just financial frontiers, though that's his day job: He cofounded PayPal, the online money-transfer service, and, most famously, was the angel investor whose half-million-dollar loan catapulted Facebook out of Harvard's dormitories and into the lives of its 750 million users. (In The Social Network, Thiel was portrayed as the crisp venture capitalist whose investment, and dark questioning, widen the rift between Facebook's cofounders.) He manages a hedge fund, Clarium Capital, and is a founding partner in a venture-capital firm called the Founders Fund, both of them housed in an airy brick building on the campuslike grounds of the Presidio, not far from Thiel's jogging path. Yet his frontier obsession extends much further than spreadsheets, further than even technology. Political frontiers, social frontiers, scientific frontiers: All these and more crowd Thiel's head as he navigates the shoreline.

"We're at this pretty important point in society," he says during a brisk walk toward the Golden Gate Bridge, "where we can either find a way to rediscover a frontier, or we're going to be forced to change in a way that's really tough." Thiel is a medium-size man with a compact and blocky frame, close-trimmed reddish-brown hair, and eyes the limpid-blue color of Windex; he has a small, nasal voice and tends to exert himself as he speaks, frequently circling back to amend or reconfigure or soften what he's saying. Discussing the concept of frontiers, however, animates him to an almost uninterruptible degree; concepts, more than anything else, seem to do that.

"One of the things that's endlessly dazzling and mesmerizing is this question about the future—what the world is going to be like in 20 years, and what can or should we do to make it better than the default track that it's on," he says, gesturing with his hands while maintaining a fixed stare on the pathway. "But it's a question you can never quite master. I played a lot of chess when I was growing up, and it's similar to some elements of chess, where you can see some moves but you can't see to the end of the game. Even a computer the size of the universe couldn't actually analyze it. There's, like, 10 to the 117th power possible games and something like 10 to the 80th atoms in the observable universe, so it's off by something like 37 orders of magnitude. And chess is something much simpler than reality—it's 32 pieces on an eight-by-eight board. Figuring out the complete future of a chess game is a problem more complicated than anything that can be solved in our universe, so figuring out this planet or just our society in the next 10 or 15 years is just not a solvable problem."

Thiel (center) with his Founder's Fund partners Ken Howery (left) and Sean Parker.  Photograph Tom Shierlitz

Despite the innovations of the past quarter century, some of which have made him very, very wealthy, Thiel is unimpressed by how far we've come—technologically, politically, socially, financially, the works. The last successful American car company, he likes to note, was Jeep, founded in 1941. "And our cars aren't moving any faster," he says. The space-age future, as giddily envisioned in the fifties and sixties, has yet to arrive. Perhaps on the micro level—as in microprocessors—but not in the macro realm of big, audacious, and outlandish ideas where Thiel prefers to operate. He gets less satisfaction out of conventional investments in "cloud music" (Spotify) and Hollywood films (Thank You for Smoking) than he does in pursuing big ideas, which is why Thiel—along with an all-star cast of venture capitalists, including former PayPal cohorts Ken Howery and Luke Nosek, and Sean Parker, the Napster cofounder and onetime Facebook president—established the Founders Fund. Among its quixotic but potentially highly profitable investments are SpaceX, a space-transport company, and Halcyon Molecular, which aspires to use DNA sequencing to extend human life. Privately, however, Thiel is the primary backer for an idea that takes big, audacious, and outlandish to a whole other level. Two hundred miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge, past that hazy-blue horizon where the Pacific meets the sky, is where Thiel foresees his boldest venture of all. Forget start-up companies. The next frontier is start-up countries.

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"Massive Decline" in Use of Facebook

by John Aravosis

Greg Pouy summarizes a new GlobalWebIndex study of Internet usage worldwide. Greg's post is in French, but the study is in English.  Here are some of the key points:

1. The data suggests a "massive decline" in the use of the Facebook, particularly in English-speaking countries.

Click image to see larger version.

2. For 16 to 24 year olds, the Web, and especially social media, is their primary information source.
3. Instant messenger use is declining (I think this means the use of instant messaging software such as AOL, MSN, iChat etc).
4. eCommerce remains weak in Italian and Spain.
5. Strong development of eCommerce and social media in Turkey, China and Brazil.
6. The use of mobile Internet (I think they mean Internet access via cell phones, but possibly also tablets) is strong in both Asia and Latin America, while the usage itself tends to take place at home.
7. Many consumers are willing to pay for online content, but there are big differences between countries and age groups.
8. Microblogging (retweeting news via Twitter, for example) is growing significantly in Brazil, Russia, India and China.
9. People are still watching lots of TV, even people who are very active online.

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