Tim Rogers:

As a kid in San Francisco, Ladar had used a bulletin-board system called Nerdshack. In fact, his first email address was a Nerdshack account. The service folded, and a lawyer bought the URL. Ladar knew this fact because, feeling nostalgic about his childhood email address, he would check every six months or so to see who owned Nerdshack.com. In the summer of 2002, the URL became available, and he snapped it up. He sat on it for almost two years before he figured out how to use it. Here was his thinking:

If you wanted to attract an audience and then charge advertisers to reach that audience, you could either spend a lot of money to create content for the audience, or, far more cheaply, you could build a platform and let the audience generate its own content. That’s email. Seeing it as a medium around which to wrap ads might not sound groundbreaking today, but at the time, no one had heard of “user-generated content.” Wikipedia was in its infancy. Gmail didn’t exist until the same year Nerdshack did.

Ladar launched his free email service in April 2004. There were no ads initially, and revenue was nonexistent. Really, it was an expensive hobby. Rodenberg was working at the time for a startup based in downtown Dallas. He let his buddy Ladar use the company’s T1 internet connection for Nerdshack, but it quickly sucked up so much bandwidth that it had to be moved to a separate data center and pay its own way.

Ladar thinks there might be 1,000 people on the planet who share his combination of skill sets. (This assessment does not take into account his proficiency in volleyball or wilderness survival.) There is writing software for an email service, and then there’s running the hardware and the databases that make the service hum. Without venture capital or employees, Ladar did it all himself. And then, a year and a half after he started Nerdshack, he revamped the entire operation.

In 2006, he rolled out a major reconfiguration of his email service (adding IMAP to his POP service, if you must know). And as long as he was doing that, he figured, he should come up with a snappier name, something with less “nerd” in it. Too, he’d been reading about the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. Better known by its abbreviated acronym, the Patriot Act had become law in a legislative paroxysm triggered by the 9/11 attacks, greatly expanding the government’s surveillance operations on several fronts. In high school, Ladar had debated the legality of random locker searches as a member of the Junior State of America. He now saw parallels between that situation and this one, where the liberties of the many innocent would be curtailed in pursuit of the guilty few. He also saw a business opportunity. Thus was born Nerdshack’s offspring, Lavabit, an email service for the privacy-minded.

Russell Brandom:

In 2011, IBM’s Watson supercomputer got an unusually public proof-of-concept, competing on Jeopardy! and beating its human competitors hands-down. It was a powerful public win for IBM, and for artificial intelligence at large, but the computer at the center of all that publicity was still basically a prototype. If Watson can do this, IBM wanted to say, imagine what it can do in the real world.

Now, Watson is getting its chance. For the past year, the Watson team has been building up the supercomputer’s medical skills, scanning through exam books to learn the basic principles of diagnosis and learning to parse the often-confusing mess of data in electronic health records. Watson has already served on the business side of Sloan-Kettering hospital, where there are fewer malpractice concerns, but a new three-year program will usher the supercomputer into the examination rooms of the Cleveland Clinic. The goal is to create a digital assistant that can point doctors to crucial data and likely diagnoses based on a patient’s medical history. If IBM can get the system working, it could be a lifeline to overworked doctors and overcrowded hospitals — but first, the company will have to navigate an unusually tangled web of data, and an industry that’s proven particularly resistant to digitization.

God’s handiwork on brilliant display.

University of Wisconsin Arboretum.

Damon Lavrinc:

Nearly every automaker is working on some form of autonomous vehicle technology, but according to a new study, consumers are more interested in a self-driving car from Google than General Motors.

The study, conducted by U.S. audit and advisory firm KPMG, polled a diverse group of drivers from both coasts and in between, pulling samples from Los Angeles, California; Chicago, Illinois; and Iselin, New Jersey.

The focus groups were asked about their willingness to use an autonomous vehicle every day, and rank their trust in the company producing the car on a scale of one to 10. While high-end automakers like Mercedes-Benz received a median score of 7.75, tech companies like Google and Apple scored an eight, and mass-market brands (Chevrolet and Nissan) came in at five.

“We believe that self-driving cars will be profoundly disruptive to the traditional automotive ecosystem,” said Gary Silberg, KPMG auto expert and author of the report. The company’s polling bears that out, although KPMG is quick to add the caveat that while “focus group discussions are valuable for the qualitative, directional insights they provide; they are not statistically valid.”

Still, the study bore some interesting — if not entirely surprising — results.

Related: Google to Sell Users Endorsements.

Kopin Tan:

Can’t such policies go on for a while? After all, we still don’t have inflation…

According to the U.S. government! But you must buy some things: insurance, food, even paper. The price of nearly everything is going up. We have inflation in India, China, Norway, Australia—everywhere but the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I’m telling you they’re lying. Go to a restaurant in New York, or a grocery store, and tell me that there’s no inflation. [Rogers starts tapping on his laptop]. Look here: In 2001, it cost $9 to go to the top of the Empire State Building. Now it’s $27 to go to the 86th floor, $44 to go to the top, and $67 to go express. The Museum of Modern Art in 2001 was $10, now it’s $25. A cab from Kennedy airport to Manhattan in 2001 was $30 plus tolls. Now it starts at $52.

Frances Coppolla:

The London property market is booming. Property prices have risen by 9.7% in the last year and there is no sign of any decline. Such large price rises are, of course, only happening in London, not the rest of the UK, where property price rises are lower the further you are from London (in Scotland prices are actually falling). But the same is happening in other large cities such as New York. Prime real estate in big cities has never been so expensive – and so desirable.

Yet people are leaving London. Both the FT and the NY Times carry opinion columns by disgruntled journalists who have decided the cost of property in London is way too high and are moving elsewhere. And they report that others are doing so too. Here’s Michael Goldfarb in the NYT:

“Matt, who had been looking for a house for more than three years, summed up the reason for leaving best: “I don’t want to be a slave to a mortgage for the next 25 years.” Given the astronomic rise in house prices here, he wasn’t speaking metaphorically.”

So if people are leaving London, how do we explain such enormous price rises? Ordinarily we would expect what the NYT calls “London’s great exodus” to cause prices to fall, not rise. But there is a simple reason, and it is due to the new role of property in the global economy. London’s prices are rising at the same time as its residents are leaving for one simple reason. Property in these city centres no longer exists to provide homes for ordinary people. It exists to provide safe, high-yielding assets for the rich. As Michael Goldfarb points out:

Byron Acohido:

Markey reacted to a story in last Saturday’s New York Times examining how the online advertising industry is now able to track consumers across the various platforms and devices they use, often without the user’s knowledge or consent.

That Times’ scoop followed an Oct. 2 report about how the National Security Agency conducted a secret pilot program in 2010 and 2011 to test the collection of bulk data about the location of Americans’ cell phones. That pilot program was never carried out.

Even so, Markey said in a statement issued late Thursday to reporters that he is “concerned about the increasing practice of marketers scooping up digital traces from our phones, tablets and computers that are then stitched together into detailed dossiers without consumers’ knowledge or permission.”

In a separate — but very much related development on Thursday — data management firm Identity Finder disclosed how the caching mechanism in Google’s popular Chrome browser stores unencrypted personal data in a way that makes it trivial for hackers to steal.

Andrew English:

“So that’s why everyone comes back with a smile on their face,” said the Toyota translator as she pulled up in the i-Road tilting-trike concept after begging a short drive.

If you thought the appearance of this space-age tandem two seater was pretty wacky when it first appeared at the Geneva Motor Show last March, let me tell you, the driving experience is equally out of this world.

It’s also more fun than it has a right to be, our translator completely nailed it. No one climbs out of i-Road without a silly grin on their visog, although rear passengers tend to have a slightly horrified look. As for chief engineer Akihiro Yanaka’s idea of selling the idea of swooping around town in one of these to pensioners, well it would have to be a super granny who put her shopping basket into an i-Road.
Designed in house by Koji Fujita with its tilting battery-electric driveline engineered by a team under Yanaka, the i-Road is an urban runabout concept.

The motor industry has a long history of both three wheels going back to the earliest Morgan trikes and tilting bodies going back to the Thirties and more recently with a series of Mercedes-Benz concepts the 1997 Lifejet and 2002 Carving and BMW’s tilting tricycle eco concepts. As with the 1970s Advanced Passenger Train or more recent Pendolino trains, tilting a car’s body allows it to cope with more horizontal force so you can corner faster and more safely.

I have long enjoyed taking sports photos, particularly those of our children along with their friends, teammates and from time to time, competitors.

Lugging around a big, but excellent Canon zoom with the occasional extender offers its rewards. The images are sublime:

Tap to view a larger version.

Yet, technology marches on, possibly leaving the incumbent camera manufacturers in the dust (Scroll down a bit to catch “Fake Chuck’s” worthwhile rant on smartphone competition).

Apple has continued to improve the iPhone’s still and moving image capability. The photos are remarkable for such a small yet powerful computer. I recently had an opportunity to capture a number of outdoor tennis images with the new iPhone 5s (unlocked).

Lack of a big zoom requires quite a bit of moving around, something that is not always possible in an active sports venue.

Seated about 20 to 25 feet (6 to 7.6m) away from the players, I used the iPhone 5s’s camera app, digitally zoomed in and tried to focus on the moving player. I attempted to anticipate action. I then pressed and held the camera app’s shutter button. The iPhone 5s captures ten (!) frames per second in “burst mode”.

A few examples:

Tap to view a larger image

While the iPhone 5s will not completely supplant the big lens crowd, perhaps the next generation or two might. What software techniques might drive the next round of improvements? Three come to mind:

1. Focus Stacking. Focustwist app.

2. Lytro

3. Panoramic techniques used in combination with one and two above.

Next, a look at the Sony’s WiFi camera lens for iPhone and Android. A fascinating concept, though constrained by usability and battery issues.

Patrick Lin:

If a small tree branch pokes out onto a highway and there’s no incoming traffic, we’d simply drift a little into the opposite lane and drive around it. But an automated car might come to a full stop, as it dutifully observes traffic laws that prohibit crossing a double-yellow line. This unexpected move would avoid bumping the object in front, but then cause a crash with the human drivers behind it.

Should we trust robotic cars to share our road, just because they are programmed to obey the law and avoid crashes?

Our laws are ill-equipped to deal with the rise of these vehicles (sometimes called “automated”, “self-driving”, “driverless”, and “robot” cars—I will use these interchangeably). For example, is it enough for a robot car to pass a human driving test? In licensing automated cars as street-legal, some commentators believe that it’d be unfair to hold manufacturers to a higher standard than humans, that is, to make an automated car undergo a much more rigorous test than a new teenage driver.

But there are important differences between humans and machines that could warrant a stricter test. For one thing, we’re reasonably confident that human drivers can exercise judgment in a wide range of dynamic situations that don’t appear in a standard 40-minute driving test; we presume they can act ethically and wisely. Autonomous cars are new technologies and won’t have that track record for quite some time.

Moreover, as we all know, ethics and law often diverge, and good judgment could compel us to act illegally. For example, sometimes drivers might legitimately want to, say, go faster than the speed limit in an emergency. Should robot cars never break the law in autonomous mode? If robot cars faithfully follow laws and regulations, then they might refuse to drive in auto-mode if a tire is under-inflated or a headlight is broken, even in the daytime when it’s not needed.