Darran Anderson:

In 1298, the Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo found himself in a Genoese prison, having been seized at the helm of a war galley during the Battle of Curzola. There he met the chivalric writer Rustichello of Pisa to whom he related tales of his travels along the Silk Road into Asia in the previous decades. The resulting manuscript The Description of the World or The Travels of Marco Polo became a literary sensation, being reproduced across Medieval Europe. Such were the extravagant claims in this “great book of puzzles”, many were taken to be fabrications and Polo earned the nickname “the Man of a Million Lies”. It was doubted by some that he’d even travelled at all except around his own evidently vast imagination.

The accounts did however contain many genuine discoveries alongside exaggerations, half-truths and myths (‘How the Prayer of the One-Eyed Cobbler Caused the Mountain to Move’ for example) mixed together without differentiation. We can now pour scorn on his claims of desert sirens luring the unwary to their deaths, colossal birds who fed on elephants, idolaters “adept in sorceries and diabolical arts” who could control sandstorms or witnessing Noah’s Ark perched on a mountaintop where the snow never melts. At the time, these were scarcely more unbelievable than his claims of “stones that burn like logs” (coal), paper currency, seeing the highest mountains in the world (the Himalayas) or visiting vast golden cities hung with the finest silks yet we know these now to be fairly accurate descriptions.

The backbone of Polo’s travelogue is made up of his visits to various Oriental cities (Baudas, Samarcan, Caracoron and so on) culminating in the opulent palaces of the Chinese Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan, at whose court he was a guest for 17 years. His recollections of the centres and their populaces range from the mercantile (lists of industries and natural resources) to the fanciful; cities where the inhabitants are perpetually drunk, where men ride around on stags eating birds, where marriages are arranged between ghosts or the great Kaan in his marble palace drinks wine from levitating goblets. Often Polo would add boasts and hyperbole (“no one could imagine finer” is a recurring phrase) and even suggest he was holding back for fear of arousing incredulity in the readers (“I will relate none of this in this book of ours; people would be amazed if they heard it, but it would serve no good purpose”) which only served to further his ridicule. When he was on his deathbed, a priest giving last rites asked Polo if he wished to confess to exaggerating his recollections to which he replied, “I did not reveal half of what I saw because no one would have believed me.” Beyond their narrow confines, the world was more extraordinary than his sceptics were capable of imagining. Raised in the seemingly impossible ‘floating city’ of Venice, a maze of canals and alleys built on stilts in a lagoon, Marco Polo had no such limitations.

Mike Lofgren:

Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo.
 
 – The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade (1871)
 
 There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power. [1]
 
 During the last five years, the news media has been flooded with pundits decrying the broken politics of Washington. The conventional wisdom has it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become the new normal. That is certainly the case, and I have been among the harshest critics of this development. But it is also imperative to acknowledge the limits of this critique as it applies to the American governmental system. On one level, the critique is self-evident: In the domain that the public can see, Congress is hopelessly deadlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s, the violently rancorous decade preceding the Civil War.

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.