Mark Hanson:

Let me preface this note by saying “I am a raging bull over houses”. I love real estate. On any given Sunday you can find me and my family touring open resale houses or new builder communities. My grammar school-aged kids love it too; especially the free cookies and peering into the beautifully staged rooms and really believing that some lucky kid has every gadget or musical instrument ever made and with utter amazement on how clean he keeps his room. Of course, my wife and I fully propagate the lie by saying “did you two see how clean the Lennar boy and Pulte girl keep their rooms? Why can’t you do the same?”
 
 I think it’s safe to say that America — especially the American media and Wall Street firms — has fallen in love with real estate again. But, this time around it’s not ‘all of America’ like the last time; when the most exotic mortgage loans known to mankind turned every ma and pa end-user homeowner into a raging speculator. One has to look no further than the generationally low level of purchase loan applications — with rates at generational lows — to realize something isn’t ‘normal’ about this housing market. Rather, controlling this housing market over the past three years has been a small, unorthodox slice of the population that “invests” in real estate using tractor-trailer trucks full of cash-money slopping around the financial system put into play specifically for this purpose. Over the past few years so much cash-money has been deployed into the housing sector by unorthodox parties, that in many regions ma and pa end-user hasn’t stood a chance to buy. Especially, if they need a mortgage loan, which of course presents numerous risks to the seller vs the all-cash buyer.
 
 In part, this is why I believe we could be back in a house-price bubble right now and not even realize it. And also because everybody is looking at the wrong thing…house prices. Sound confusing? It’s not, really.

Josh Harkinson:

When my in-laws moved from India to the United States some 35 years ago, they couldn’t believe the low cost and abundance of our milk—until they developed digestive problems. They’ll now tell you the same thing I’ve heard a lot of immigrants say: American milk will make you sick.
 
 It turns out that they could be onto something. An emerging body of research suggests that many of the 1 in 4 Americans who exhibit symptoms of lactose intolerance could instead be unable to digest A1, a protein most often found in milk from the high-producing Holstein cows favored by American and some European industrial dairies. The A1 protein is much less prevalent in milk from Jersey, Guernsey, and most Asian and African cow breeds, where, instead, the A2 protein predominates.
 
 “We’ve got a huge amount of observational evidence that a lot of people can digest the A2 but not the A1,” says Keith Woodford, a professor of farm management and agribusiness at New Zealand’s Lincoln University who wrote the 2007 book Devil in the Milk: Illness, Health, and the Politics of A1 and A2 Milk. “More than 100 studies suggest links between the A1 protein and a whole range of health conditions”—everything from heart disease to diabetes to autism, Woodford says, though the evidence is far from conclusive.

Amy Merrick:

When the Woodville Mall opened, in 1969, in Northwood, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo, its developers bragged about the mall’s million square feet of enclosed space; its anchor tenants, which included Sears and J. C. Penney; and its air-conditioning—seventy-two degrees, year-round! Two years later, the Toledo Blade published a front-page article about the photo-takers and people-watchers who gathered around the mall’s marble fountain, “that gushing monument to big spending and the shopping spree.” The story quoted an anonymous businessman: “The water has a great calming effect on a person, especially when you’ve been badgered all morning.”

This week, Woodville is being torn down. So are countless other malls across the U.S.—so many that there’s a Web site devoted to “dead malls” that are out of commission. In some cases, the buildings have been converted into community colleges, corporate headquarters, or churches. Others, like the Woodville Mall, have become so damaged by water, mold, and asbestos that city officials are glad to demolish them. In January, Rick Caruso, the C.E.O. of Caruso Affiliated, one of the largest privately held American real-estate companies, stood on a stage at the Javits Center, in New York, and forecast the demise of the traditional mall. “Within ten to fifteen years, the typical U.S. mall, unless it is completely reinvented, will be a historical anachronism—a sixty-year aberration that no longer meets the public’s needs, the retailers’ needs, or the community’s needs,” he told his audience, which had gathered for the National Retail Federation’s annual convention.

Jason Karaian:

“There are only two important people in the wine business—the winemaker and the wine drinker. Right now, they’re both getting screwed.”

Rowan Gormley doesn’t mince words. The founder of Naked Wines, part venture capital firm and part wholesale buying club, has little time for the wine industry’s traditional ways. This might be because he’s an accountant by training. But his background belies a deep appreciation for wine, and a missionary’s zeal for rewriting the rules of how the product gets from grape to glass. He thinks he can apply his financial background and some fresh thinking to shake up the established order in an old-fashioned, exclusive, and often incestuous industry. So far, it seems to be working.

Kyle Pearce:

The E-Estonia system will seem a little Orwellian to some people. Watching the documentary about the system above made me think of the potential dark side of a digital citizenship system in the wrong hands.
 
 However, the system clearly improves lives of Estonian citizens. In a sense, it actually increases their freedom by streamlining their interactions with their government, which makes large and grossly inefficient government bureaucracies less necessary. This could be the reason why Estonians enjoy excellent social services and also pay low taxes by European standards.
 
 The most notable way it improves the lives of Estonians is by reducing the amount of paperwork and time wasted waiting in long lines at government offices. Estonians can renew their passports, update their drivers license, register a new business and access their voting or medical records instantly through the digital citizenship system.
 
 The system is also robust and secure, in fact, it seems a lot more secure than more traditional paper files where it is difficult to track who views them. With their E-Estonia initiative, a digital footprint is created by all activity, which makes everything more secure. As a testament to what the Estonians have created, NATO chose to base their Cooperative Cyber Defence initiative in the Estonian capital of Tallinn.
 
 Regardless of whether you find E-Estonia’s digital citizenship system Orwellian or innovation genius, technology is going to transform the nature of government, citizenship and society itself. With the right digital infrastructure, we can replace inefficient bureaucracies with digital access passes and replace most politicians with crowdsourcing systems where citizens directly participate in the debate and then vote on the issues that affect their lives.

Barrons:

The first iterations of a new technology can seem astonishingly clunky, at least in retrospect. Often, they are more a proof of concept than a practical device.

The first hydrogen bomb, detonated in 1952, was the size of a three-story house and weighed 82 tons. No airplane in the world could have carried it. Within little more than a decade, however, the thermonuclear warheads atop missiles were roughly the size of garbage cans and weighed less than 700 pounds.

A century and a half earlier, the first steam engines were very large and heavy relative to the power they produced. The big engines that drove the Philadelphia waterworks in the early 19th century — the largest steam engines in the country at the time — were built using James Watt’s low-pressure design. They had 32-inch cylinders with a stroke of six feet. But they only put out 12 horsepower. Even the more-efficient high-pressure engines, independently designed by Oliver Evans in the U.S. and Richard Trevithick in Britain, were bulky, and they were ravenous consumers of coal.

Dan Geer:

I am particularly fond of the late Peter Bernstein’s definition of
 risk: “More things can happen than will.”[PB] I like that definition
 not because it tells me what to do, but rather because it tells me
 what comes with any new expansion of possibilities. Put differently,
 it tells me that with the new, the realm of the possible expands
 and, as we know, when the realm of the possible expands, prediction
 is somewhere between difficult and undoable. The dynamic is that
 we now regularly, quickly expand our dependence on new things, and
 that added dependence matters because the way in which we each and
 severally add risk to our portfolio is by way of dependence on
 things for which their very newness makes risk estimation, and thus
 risk management, neither predictable nor perhaps even estimable.
 
 The Gordian Knot of such tradeoffs — our tradeoffs — is this: As
 society becomes more technologic, even the mundane comes to depend
 on distant digital perfection. Our food pipeline contains less
 than a week’s supply, just to take one example, and that pipeline
 depends on digital services for everything from GPS driven tractors
 to robot vegetable sorting machinery to coast-to-coast logistics
 to RFID-tagged livestock. Is all the technologic dependency, and
 the data that fuels it, making us more resilient or more fragile?

Panoramic image: tap and and pan in any direction.

www.grinnell.edu

Jeff Green & Keith Naughton:

The world that Henry Ford put on wheels is poised for a stall.

In the globe’s growing megacities, pollution and gridlock are putting a damper on driving. In India, some commuters are leaving their cars at home to avoid traffic snarls and long prowls for parking.

More young Americans are forgoing the dream of auto ownership for public transport, bikes and vehicle-sharing. Cars on the road are lasting longer than ever.

All of that may herald a new era for an auto industry weaned on a century of global growth. The world will reach “peak car” — a point at which annual global sales growth will top out — in the next decade, several auto-industry analysts predict. Researcher IHS Automotive, for one, sees annual sales cresting at 100 million within that time.

Peak car is at odds with the ambitious expansion plans of global automakers, which IHS says are gearing up to produce more than 120 million vehicles by 2016 — almost 50 percent more than last year’s worldwide sales mark of 82 million. The dynamic also threatens the business plans of parts producers, suppliers of raw material and oil companies.

Driving this upheaval is a rapidly emerging reality: The vehicle that ushered in an unparalleled era of personal mobility in the last century is, in many cases, no longer the most convenient conveyance, particularly as more of the world’s population migrates to big cities.

No one is predicting that car sales will suddenly fall off or that today’s car companies are now dinosaurs. What the experts do see is a reckoning for car companies, which may have to adapt to a world with less car-buying and more car-sharing, more cars that drive themselves and fewer hot rodders on the highway.

“The key question is: Do you sell cars or do you sell mobility?” said Tim Ryan, vice chairman of markets and strategy for consultant PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. “If you ignore these megatrends, you run the risk of becoming irrelevant.”

View the IHS Automotive Study here.

Robin Cook & Eric Topol:

A sweeping transformation of medicine has begun that will rival in importance the introduction of anesthesia or the discovery of the germ basis of infectious disease. It will change how patients and physicians interact. It will change medical research and therapy. “Sick care”—the current model of waiting for you to get sick and then trying to alleviate symptoms and make you well—will become true “health care,” where prevention is the mantra and driving force. Welcome to the world of digital medicine.

First and foremost, the digitalization of medicine will personalize health care: Treatment will be tailored to each person as a unique individual suffering a unique illness according to his or her genetic makeup. Currently, therapy is based on population statistics. Patients are separated into groups defined in various ways but usually by similar symptoms or by the results of basic lab tests (like cholesterol levels). These groups are then treated with drugs that may help many people, but not all of them, and often only a fraction of them. By incorporating information from an individual’s DNA, the data made available through digitalization will enable clinicians to match individuals with treatments. Only patients who will benefit will get a particular drug.