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...Ricci's Chinese friends and passages naming territories ("Ka-na-ta," for example) and describing the habits of those who live there. That's how we can be sure that Ming China knew about hammocks. In parts of South America, Ricci wrote, "men sleep without beds or mattresses, but make nets of knotted cords. These they suspend from trees and recline in them." (The Library of Congress does not offer a translation of the text, but you can find a good one in the 1918 and '19 issues of the Geographical Journal...
Seventeenth century Chinese, of course, would have grasped the aesthetics of the map quite differently from the way Occidentals do today. In China, "calligraphy is a visual art," says Yee. Combining European learning with Chinese artistic tradition, Ricci worked to make his map (and his mission) attractive to his Chinese hosts. Ricci, Yee says, "knew his stuff...
...appears that UPS's ability to continually adjust to the economy and its ongoing evolution as a logistics provider has paid off. You may know it as an outfit that delivers the goods, but for UPS it's becoming less important that the folks in the brown trucks make the final handoff. Delivering a package efficiently is what it gets paid for. And the company is getting paid more often. "It's very rare to hear such bold statements from UPS management," says Helane Becker, transportation analyst for Jesup & Lamont Securities. "So we can take this to mean they truly...
Packages are not just objects; they are also data, and in all its decisions, UPS has used the latter to make delivering the former more efficient. Since the late 1980s, the carrier has invested billions in technology to perfect the art of tracking shipments. Data now decides everything from the number of drivers needed each day to the exact routes their trucks should travel. "This traditionally is a company of engineers obsessed with detail," says Doug Caldwell, a principal at ParcelResearch.com based in Portland, Ore. "And all of those hundreds of little things add up to impressive advantages in efficiency...
This shift presents a logistical puzzle, because there's no way the engineers can make a single Amazon shipment to the far reaches of, say, Alaska economical. The answer might surprise you: UPS and FedEx are now outsourcing delivery to a longtime rival, the U.S. Postal Service. "The postal service is already mandated by Congress to stop at every house," Caldwell says. "So why not outsource that last-mile delivery?" In other words, let USPS handle the money losers...