Data Anxiety

mcgrawhillcompanies:

S&P Capital IQ acquired R² Financial Technologies, a leading provider of advanced risk and scenario-based analytics to traders, portfolio and risk managers for pricing, hedging and capital management across asset classes.

Lou Eccleston, President of S&P Capital IQ, said…

How a simple online map almost caused a violent conflict in Central America.

tingletech:

pip install iotop

Make sure to check the page footer, where the valid XHTML and CSS badges are. There’s another one, right-most corner of the page. It reads along these lines:

“Hopefully this page is 100% compliant with your expectations”

in very small type. Yet there for those who might look. And laugh.

I’m guessing Manhattan, probably East 23rd Street, between Third Avenue and Park Avenue? Not certain.

cryptocatapp:

We’ve updated the Cryptocat protocol to version 1.2. Both the web and Chrome app versions have had their codebases updated to reflect the changes, so Chrome app users will need to update their Cryptocat app in order to be able to use the latest version of the protocol along with those accessing…

Interesting feature here:

We’ve added a requirement for clients to verify the size of all received public keys (2^4092 < pubkey < p) in order to mitigate against adversarially small public keys.

I never thought of that. This part was especially succinct and descriptive: “mitigate against adversarily small public keys”. Of course, I am not trained (nor experienced) in cryptography. I only know random and pseudo-random number related things.

I like the CryptoCat tumblr. They seem to enjoy and emphasize the part of cryptography that I know enough to understand a little.

Of course, I also enjoy the CryptoCat logo. It reminds me of an alert, goal-oriented nyan cat.

The Obama administration’s new federal corporate tax proposal aims to simplify the code that has resulted in widely varying federal tax rates. This chart shows the range of S.& P. 500 companies’ ratios of total taxes paid — federal, state, local and foreign — to pretax earnings for 2005 to 2010.

A group that aims to reduce gun violence says it is boycotting the coffee giant Tuesday because Starbucks has not stopped customers from bringing guns into stores when the law allows it. 

Emphasis mine. It is certainly ironic that Starbucks and 2nd Amendment types would be aligned. But it isn’t reasonable to expect Starbucks to break local laws. The company is complying with local gun-control laws, no more, no less. I don’t know what the legalities are, actually. Lots of restaurants have a “no shoes, no shirt, no service” policy. That is an easier call, because it can be justified based on public health laws.

The question I have is this: Why now? Nothing has changed with Seattle gun laws. Nothing has changed in Starbucks policy. Maybe because people are generally more riled up and alert due to election season? I really don’t know.