Infotrade

A little more than a year ago, Berkshire Hathaway ( BRK.A ) Chairman Warren E. Buffett made his famous "all-in wager" on the economic future of the U.S. Berkshire spent $26.5 billion to buy the 77 percent of Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad the company didn't already own, essentially taking it private. It seemed a daring bet at the time, considering that the U.S. had fallen into a deep recession that had crushed consumer spending and created the highest unemployment in a quarter century. Yet in only 15 months the Burlington investment has played out better than even Buffett says he expected. The recovery from the recession, which ended in late 2009, continues to strengthen, unemployment has dipped, and even the unforeseen jump in oil prices has worked to railroads' advantage. All that's buoyed Buffett's financial return: In the first 13 months since the buyout, Burlington paid out $2.25 billion in dividends to its new parent, Berkshire, and will fork ove...

Economic bubbles have been around since the birth of currency. Created by a wide range of factors, from excessive monetary liquidity to plain old human greed, exuberance and stupidity, they can be described as a trade in products or assets valued far higher than they should be – which is inevitably followed by a crash in prices. Seek to uncover the causes behind some of history’s most famous bubbles and you’ll find that many arose out of a pretty bizarre set of circumstances. It seems that these economic events can strike the most unusual of markets at the most unlikely of times. Below we take a look at 10 such examples. 10. Tulip Mania In 1593, tulips were brought from Turkey to Holland and the Dutch instantly fell in love with this most beguiling of flowers. By the latter months of 1636, certain varieties of tulip were worth more than an Amsterdam house! While demand grew exponentially, supply was initially low, compounded by bulb buyers filling their inventories and the four to sev...

A soldier takes a Sharpie and scribbles his blood type onto the back of his helmet, before he heads into combat. Later, injured and unconscious on the battlefield, that “O+” is all the health information a medical crew has to go on. But not for long. If the Army gets its way, those EMT’s might be able to read full patient medical records off a screen right in front of their eyes. A  recent solicitation  for small businesses calls for a brand new pair of “Battlefield Medical Situational Awareness Goggles,” which would allow battlefield medics to receive and document every emergency with a see-through display mounted to their head. Information overlaid onto their field of view would be accessible at all times, no matter where they were looking. Pilots  have used  heads-up displays  to keep their eyes off their instruments for over half a century. But since then the displays have popped up in all sorts of contexts, from driving  cars  to riding  bik...

Earlier this year,  Wikipedia  celebrated its 10-year anniversary. Since launching in January 2001, the editable, online encyclopedia has grown to epic proportions: Over 18.1 million articles in all languages, 3.5 million monthly edits and 36,700 editors active on a daily basis. The English Wikipedia’s front page alone receives 150 million views every month. To mark the occasion,  JESS3  teamed up with Wikipedia co-founder  Jimmy Wales  and the  Wikimedia Foundation  to create a  video  detailing the site’s rich history, profiling the expansive community and explaining Wales’ long-term vision. Screenshots from “The State of Wikipedia”  video : So what’s Wikipedia’s significance? Google your company. What do you find near the top of results? That’s right — a Wikipedia article. Even though you’d probably rather people went to your corporate website first, the fact is most will still go to the Wikipedia article first, because ...

Plenty of American businesses have outsourced jobs across the globe, and now colleges are jumping on the bandwagon. Colleges are hiring online "tutors" to check student work for grammar and other English mistakes and provide the kind of feedback students used to get from professors or teaching assistants before  budget cuts  resulted in staff layoffs and unmanageably large class sizes. Here's how it works: Schools like West Hills Community College in central California hire services like Virginia-based RichFeedback. When a student turns in a paper, the professor sends it to RichFeedback, which then passes it along to its own tutors, mostly based in India. According to the  Fresno Bee , the tutors return the papers "covered with color-coded corrections, suggestions for improvements and references to class text examples." Then professors only have to spend time evaluating a paper's subject-matter content. So is it a big deal if the person correcting your pape...

The flying pips, shattered shells and wet shrapnel still haunt farmer Liu Mingsuo after an effort to chemically boost his fruit crop went spectacularly wrong. Fields of watermelons exploded when he and other agricultural workers in eastern  China  mistakenly applied forchlorfenuron, a growth accelerator. The incident has become a focus of a Chinese media drive to expose the lax  farming  practices, shortcuts and excessive use of fertiliser behind a rash of  food  safety scandals. It follows discoveries of the heavy metal cadmium in rice, toxic melamine in milk, arsenic in soy sauce, bleach in mushrooms, and the detergent borax in pork, added to make it resemble beef. Compared to such cases of dangerous contamination, Liu's transgression was minor, but it has gained notoriety after being picked up by the state broadcaster, CCTV. The broadcaster blamed the bursting of the fruit on the legal chemical forchlorfenuron, which stimulates cell separation but often...

Apple and Samsung this week won awards for display technologies on their mobile devices. Apple’s iPhone and iPad earned gold Display of the Year and Display Application of the Year awards from the Society for Information Display. Both devices received praise for their usage of in-plane switching technology, in which crystal molecules are oriented so their motion is parallel to the panel, instead of perpendicular to it. The result is a very wide viewing angle — up to 180 degrees — with brilliant color. Apple’s iPhone 4 high pixel-density “Retina Display” is  reportedly manufactured by LG Displays , which is also the main supplier for the iPad’s display. Meanwhile, Samsung earned silver awards for displays on its Galaxy S smartphones, as well as its on-cell touch active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) display technology. Samsung’s displays gained applause for using Super AMOLED technology, in which pixels emit their own light so the display does not require b...

Netflix streaming movies now fill more of the U.S.’s internet tubes than any other service, including peer-to-peer file sharing, which long held the top spot — to the consternation of Hollywood. That means for the first time perhaps in the internet’s history, the largest percentage of the net’s traffic is content that is paid for. The change is reported in the  Spring traffic report 2011  (.pdf) from Sandvine, a company that sells network management and measurement software to large ISPs. Netflix accounts for 22.2% of all U.S. broadband traffic compared to BitTorrent’s 21.6% share. And at peak times, Netflix hits 30% of all traffic, a bounce of 44% over results from the fall. (Note that these numbers are about percentage of usage, and say nothing about what percentage of “capacity” the net has, so hold your horses on predicting an internet brown-out due to people streaming  Blazing Saddles ). Streaming real-time entertainment is also on the rise, including such things a...