Carey Biron:

An estimated 400 million acres of farmland in the United States will likely change hands over the coming two decades as older farmers retire, even as new evidence indicates this land is being strongly pursued by private equity investors.
 
 Mirroring a trend being experienced across the globe, this strengthening focus on agriculture-related investment by the private sector is already leading to a spike in U.S. farmland prices. Coupled with relatively weak federal policies, these rising prices are barring many young farmers from continuing or starting up small-scale agricultural operations of their own.
 
 “This is no longer necessarily about food at all, but rather is a way to reap financial profits.” — Anuradha Mittal
 
 In the long term, critics say, this dynamic could speed up the already fast-consolidating U.S. food industry, with broad ramifications for both human and environmental health.
 
 “When non-operators own farms, they tend to source out the oversight to management companies, leading in part to horrific conditions around labour and how we treat the land,” Anuradha Mittal, the executive director of the Oakland Institute, a U.S. watchdog group focusing on global large-scale land acquisitions, told IPS.

Scene 2 | Scene 3

Much more on Chichen Itza here.

Hannah Kuchler:

In a back street in San Francisco’s start-up dominated SoMa district, a rapidly growing business is busy studying how millions of employees behave each day. Its computers know in real time why a worker was hired, how productive they are and can even follow them as they move to a new job.
 
 Evolv is a leader in the nascent Quantified Workplace movement, where big data analytics companies are springing up to measure how we work. “Every week we figure out more things to track,” says Max Simkoff, Evolv’s co-founder and chief executive, who claims it can help improve productivity by at least 5 per cent in two-thirds of jobs.
 
 More than half of human resources departments around the world report an increase in the use of data analytics compared with three years ago, according to a recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit. But many employees are still blissfully unaware of how information they may deem private is being analysed by their managers.

The Economist:

GOODBYE city, hello country. In recent years some of America’s biggest urban areas like Los Angels, Chicago and the Northeast corridor have seen an outflow of people. At the same time, spectacularly beautiful places like the Southwest and Colorado have seen a massive influx.
 
 These big demographic trends are visible in a map produced by statisticians at America’s Census Bureau (below). It shows internal migration on a county-by-county basis: blue represents people leaving, red means coming in. One clearly sees the degree to which people have fled Detroit and southern Florida. At the same time, the data and other charts in the report show much less churn in the central states.

While on travel recently, I encountered a couple of photographers taking portraits, bathed in pleasant natural and artificial light. They were well equipped with modern Canon 35mm DSLR bodies, the excellent 70-200mm 2.8L ii lenses and a nice wireless flash system – which worked most of the time.

One of the photographers sported an accessory, a “strap mounted” Gizmon covered iPhone.

Intrigued, I asked the photographer about her iPhone experiences while displaying my airborne tennis player image (above), captured during a iPhone 5s 10 frames per second burst. I further mentioned that the iPhone’s relentless imaging improvements have given Canon and Nikon a historic challenge. The low to mid range camera market is being eaten by iPhone.

The reaction to my inquiry was rather hostile, “beneath contempt” and included “I could name ten things wrong with that image”. Indeed. But, the iPhone continues to improve, eating away at Canon & Nikon’s traditional camera market (see Drew Gardner’s latest). In addition, the legacy manufacturers further annoy customers with absurd pricing for features that should be standard and in fact are on the iPhone such as trivial file transfer and GPS. Canon’s “WFT-e7” “wireless file transmitter” for the 5D mk iii DSLR costs a cool $849.99! GPS? well that’s another $390.00. I was reminded of these painful prices after reading about Jennifer Szalai’s portrait style in a recent 6th Floor article.

Szailai’s portrait images are produced by two separate cameras that fire simultaneously. Remote wireless control would be useful for any number of applications.

Subsequently, I conversed with a professional photographer who was seeking input on features for a future dedicated camera from one of the usual suspects. I offered a few user interface improvements along with a recommendation for built in wifi and an sdk for iOS developers. One photographer responded that “wifi junks up the camera”, which completely misses today’s photographic (and video) reality. Fast sharing and remote control via an iOS device are essential to any camera that wishes to be purchased.

I further mentioned that the iPad Air may be used to create excellent videos in short order via iMovie and that future software will surely crunch raw photos with great speed.

I closed with “consider this a lifeline“.

Sony’s QX 10/QX 100 provide a glimpse of the possibilities that new thinking offers. I tried one and found it reasonable. Software polish, improved battery life and more responsive hardware will make this product more compelling. I enjoyed the ability to place the camera/lens and wonder around photographing and capturing video remotely via my iPhone.

My mind returned to the somewhat hostile photographer when I saw Apple’s 1-24-14 film, shot entirely on the iPhone 5s. Beautiful work that illustrates what can be done with a bit of creative thinking, not to mention the “large format” version.

Change can be hard and the unknown frightening. Yet, the new thing brings opportunity to those who seize it. Market churn is essential to education, creativity, economic opportunity and societal improvement.

Stagnation is expensive.

As for me, I remain thankful for the many opportunities that new processes and technologies have brought to my life:

James 1:17 Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.

I look forward to the arrival of the iPhone 6s, now, God willing, less than two years away.

Martin Wolf:

In 1955, Walter Reuther, head of the US car workers’ union, told of a visit to a new automatically operated Ford plant. Pointing to all the robots, his host asked: “How are you going to collect union dues from those guys?” Mr Reuther replied: “And how are you going to get them to buy Fords?” Automation is not new. Neither is the debate about its effects. How far, then, does what Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee call The Second Machine Age alter the questions or the answers?

I laid out the core argument last week. I noted that the rise of information technology coincides with increasing income inequality. Lawrence Mishel of the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute challenges the notion that the former has been the principal cause of the latter. Mr Mishel notes: “Rising executive pay and the expansion of, and better pay in, the financial sector can account for two-thirds of increased incomes at the top.” Changing social norms, the rise of stock-based remuneration and the extraordinary expansion of the financial sector also contributed. While it was a factor, technology has not determined economic outcomes.

Yet technology could become far more important. Professor Brynjolfsson and Mr McAfee also argue that it will make us more prosperous; and it will shift the distribution of opportunities among workers and between workers and owners of capital.

The economic impacts of new technologies are many and complex. They include: new services, such as Facebook; disintermediation of old systems of distribution via iTunes or Amazon; new products, such as smartphones; and new machines, such as robots. The latter awaken fears that intelligent machines will render a vast number of people redundant. A recent paper by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford university concludes that 47 per cent of US jobs are at high risk from automation. In the 19th century, they argue, machines replaced artisans and benefited unskilled labour. In the 20th century, computers replaced middle-income jobs, creating a polarised labour market. Over the next decades, however, “most workers in transport and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations, are likely to be substituted by computer capital”. Moreover, “computerisation will mainly substitute for low-skill and low-wage jobs in the near future. By contrast, high-skill and high-wage occupations are the least susceptible to computer capital.” This, then, would exacerbate inequality.

Csen:

Nothing like driving around your community for the first time in 2 days after an epic city shutdown and seeing abandoned cars still on the road to make you think about velocity increasing after a freeze.
 
 The first month of the year has been a tumultuous one for financial markets. Emerging markets have taken a tumble (see “This Water Lives In Mombasa”). Brick-and-mortar retailers like Best Buy, Gamestop, and Target have gotten blasted. Yet last night, Facebook reported stellar earnings and its stock sits at an all-time high, as mobile has gone from 0% of its revenues before its IPO to 53% of its revenues today. What we’re witnessing is the breaking down of stability (see “The Trouble With Stability”).
 
 Now that we’re almost 5 and a half years after the fall of Lehman Brothers, there’s been much talk about how far along in the recovery we are, from housing to labor to government finances. But that word, “recovery,” is dangerous, because it implies that we’re simply putting something back where it was before. While some economic actors were destroyed by 2008, others adjusted to what they believed to be a new normal. They cut costs and aggressively managed inventory. Instead of investing profits into new ventures they plowed it into stock buybacks. Others responded to low interest rates by leveraging low yielding positions, or playing a carry in higher yielding emerging markets.

Joseph Goldstein:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, in a review of a national DNA database, has identified nearly 170 profiles that probably contain errors, some the result of handwriting mistakes or interpretation errors by lab technicians, while New York State authorities have turned up mistakes in DNA profiles in New York’s database.
 
 The discoveries, submitted by the New York City medical examiner’s office to a state oversight panel, show that the capacity for human error is ever-present, even when it comes to the analysis of DNA evidence, which can take on an aura of infallibility in court, defense lawyers and scientists said.
 
 The errors identified so far implicate only a tiny fraction of the total DNA profiles in the national database, which holds nearly 13 million profiles, more than 12 million from convicts and suspects, and an additional 527,000 from crime scenes. Still, the disclosure of scores of mistaken DNA profiles at once appears to be unprecedented, scientists said.

Peter Ludlow:

However, since 9/11 leaders of both political parties in the United States have sought to consolidate power by leaning not just on the danger of a terrorist attack, but on the fact that the possible perpetrators are frightening individuals who are not like us. As President George W. Bush put it before a joint session of Congress in 2001: “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” Last year President Obama brought the enemy closer to home, arguing in a speech at the National Defense University that “we face a real threat from radicalized individuals here in the United States” — radicalized individuals who were “deranged or alienated individuals ­- often U.S. citizens or legal residents.”
 
 The Bush fear-peddling is usually considered the more extreme, but is it? The Obama formulation puts the “radicalized individuals” in our midst. They could be American citizens or legal residents. And the subtext is that if we want to catch them we need to start looking within. The other is among us. The pretext for the surveillance state is thus established.

Wikipedia on Pomegranates.