James Bessen:

For much of the last century, the United States led the world in technological innovation—a position it owed in part to well-designed procurement programs at the Defense Department and NASA. During the 1940s, for example, the Pentagon funded the construction of the first general-purpose computer, designed initially to calculate artillery-firing tables for the U.S. Army. Two decades later, it developed the data communications network known as the ARPANET, a precursor to the Internet. Yet not since the 1980s have government contracts helped generate any major new technologies, despite large increases in funding for defense-related R & D. One major culprit was a shift to procurement efforts that benefit traditional defense contractors while shutting out start-ups.
 
 Bad procurement policy is just one reason the United States has begun to lose its technological edge. Indeed, the multibillion-dollar valuations in Silicon Valley have obscured underlying problems in the way the United States develops and adopts technology. An increase in patent litigation, for example, has reduced venture capital financing and R & D investment for small firms, and strict employment regulations have strengthened large employers and prevented the spread of knowledge and skills across the industry. Although the United States remains innovative, government policies have, across the board, increasingly favored powerful interest groups at the expense of promising young start-ups, stifling technological innovation.?

A gorgeous January afternoon.

Avocado Tartine at Tulum’s excellent Pan Comido.

Mohit Kaushal and Sheel Tyle:

Chances are that you’ve heard of bitcoin, the digital currency that many predict will revolutionize payments – or prove to be a massive fraud – depending on what you read. Bitcoin is an application that runs on the Blockchain, which is ultimately a more interesting and profound innovation.
 
 The Blockchain is a secure transaction ledger database that is shared by all parties participating in an established, distributed network of computers. It records and stores every transaction that occurs in the network, essentially eliminating the need for “trusted” third parties such as payment processors. Blockchain proponents often describe the innovation as a “transfer of trust in a trustless world,” referring to the fact that the entities participating in a transaction are not necessarily known to each other yet they exchange value with surety and no third-party validation. For this reason, the Blockchain is a potential game changer.
 
 In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous person or group of people credited with developing bitcoin, released a whitepaper describing the software protocol. Since then, the network has grown and bitcoin

Lizzie Wade:

Inside the cloud that is perpetually draped over the small town of San Juan Yaee, Oaxaca, Raúl Hernández Santiago crouches down on the roof of the town hall and starts drilling. Men wearing rain gear of various impermeabilities cluster above him, holding a 4-meter-tall tower in place. Braided wires trail from four small circles welded near its midpoint; eventually those will be bolted or tied down in order to hold the tower steady during the frequent storms that roll through this part of Mexico’s Sierra de Juárez mountains. They don’t want it falling over every time it rains. Ninety thousand of the town’s pesos—a bit over $6,000—are invested in the equipment lashed to the top of the tower, in a town where many residents get by on subsistence agriculture.
 
 The tower—which Hernández, Yaee’s blacksmith, welded together out of scrap metal just a few hours earlier—is the backbone of Yaee’s first cellular network. The 90,000 pesos come in the form of two antennas and an open-source base station from a Canadian company called NuRAN. Once Hernández and company get the tower installed and the network online, Yaee’s 500 citizens will, for the first time, be able to make cell phone calls from home, and for cheaper rates than almost anywhere else in Mexico.

Evgeny Morozov:

It is the continent’s favourite hobby, and even the European Parliament cannot resist: having a pop at the world’s biggest search engine. In a recent and largely symbolic vote, representatives urged that Google search should be separated from its other services — demanding, in essence, that the company be broken up.
 This would benefit Google’s detractors but not, alas, European citizens. Search, like the social networking sector dominated by Facebook, appears to be a natural monopoly. The more Google knows about each query — who is making it, where and why — the more relevant its results become. A company that has organised, say, 90 per cent of the world’s information would naturally do better than a company holding just one-tenth of that information.
 But search is only a part of Google’s sprawling portfolio. Smart thermostats and self-driving cars are information businesses, too. Both draw on Google’s bottomless reservoirs of data, sensors such as those embedded in hardware, and algorithms. All feed off each other.

Tap or click on the above image, then pan in any direction.

A stunning sunset scene with God’s rainbow above the clearning storm.

Tap or click on the above image, then pan in any direction.

Campeche is among the New York Times’ “52 Places to Go in 2015“. It is well worth a visit.

Cliff Christl:

I attended the Ice Bowl as a 20-year-old college student and have my ticket stub to prove it. I sat in Section 18, Row 13, Seat 15, or at about the 40-yard line directly behind the Packers’ bench on the north half of the stadium. The price of my ticket was $12, and I dressed warmly enough that I don’t remember leaving my seat at halftime or at any point during the game.
 
 Sure it was cold. The temperature at kickoff was minus-13 degrees and the wind chill was minus-46. But at least it wasn’t Siberia, or what people around the NFL called Green Bay, B.L., Before Lombardi.
 
 Today, those of us who sat through the Ice Bowl have become targets of another slight. Tell someone you went to the game and they want to give you a lie detector test.

Nico Sell:

You’ve claimed that privacy is the new fame. Can you explain that?
 
 It’s now so difficult to be private that it will be the new state everyone strives for. But I don’t think we have to convince people of the need for privacy, it’ll just happen naturally… [just as] fashion is always going from skinny jeans to bell-bottoms and back again. The generation below always over-corrects to the one before, and you can already see this happening.
 
 You’ve created a messaging app, Wickr, that allows people to message each other in a completely secure, private way. A lot of people would say they’ve got nothing to hide, so why bother?
 
 We’re just trying to be the number one messenger in the world. I think privacy and security are reasons why our users will stay with us because there is no way that your information can ever be used, viewed or kept. The difference between us and what the big companies are doing is that they are encrypting messages between a device and their servers, whereas we are doing it device to device. So, we don’t know who our users are, who they’re talking to or what they’re saying. We can’t hand that information over: we don’t have it.