Financial Collapse: It's Only Natural →
capitalinstitute.org
It isn’t as grim as it seems, based on the title. Really.
June 2012
95 posts
Large Scale Systems: What is Complexity? →
empiricator.com
Some systems are inherently complex – we cannot deduce their properties by a study of their components; we cannot predict the consequences to changes to these systems. System behaviour and properties are emergent and non-deterministic. I believe that such inherent complexity stems from the fact…
Some call it innovation
@ResearchPuzzler recently attended the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Society’s annual conference.
A Midwestern critique of low latency markets
The conference began with a presentation from NYSE Euronext, titled “Has Innovation Helped or Hurt the Integrity of Markets?” and was mostly
a defense of the status quo — other than warning about the growing share of dark pools… The changes in the industry have led to much lower transaction costs, at least in equities. That’s the one shining benefit that gets pointed to as evidence of progress. But at what cost in other ways?
Much of what we call financial services innovation is dealer bookmaking. The foundation of the business relies on prop trading. Certainly, the game of cat-and-mouse with the regulators will continue, but sometimes it seems like the regulators are the mice.
What of high frequency trading?
Positive
Without HFT, there is no market. High frequency trading firms are natural counterparties… trying to take the other side of your trade.
Not so positive
Is HFT bona fide innovation?HFT firms are not liquidity providers, but liquidity takers [and quote spammers too]
No, I don’t think it is.
True innovation involves a rethinking that adds value over time, not just speeding things up to clip basis points for today — and in a business where we are stewards of the capital of others, it should lead to benefits for the many rather than for the few.
I’ve been following @ResearchPuzzler since July 2010, long before OWS. This isn’t a face-saving, or hide-preserving, quick change of attitude. @ResearchPuzzler’s website has no advertising, no (fee-based) subscriber newsletter. He is a C.F.A., not a C.P.A., but he’s rarely off the mark.
If you’re seeing ads on Wikipedia →
blog.wikimedia.org
Ads? ADS! Why? It isn’t that special time of year when we see Jimbo Wales’ photo, day in and day out, as part of the fund raising drive.
No, if you are seeing banner advertisements on Wikipedia, your computer is probably infected with malware. Read some suggestions about how to get rid of it (can you say “MalwareBytes”?) via the link (above) to a recent, sort of, May 14th post on the — Wikimedia blog.
Microsoft Surface Parody
vis web-heads:
This is NOT the Surface that Microsoft announced yesterday. Yes, they are overloading the term.
CTO Vision: Microsoft Surface Parody via SarcasticGamer [video]
I really would like one of these for home use. After all, it isn’t intended to be portable, and tossed in my purse. A table-top sized tablet would be fun! Well, it would be, until the novelty wore off. Which might never happen. It doesn’t seem to happen for iPad users.
Unfortunately, Microsoft Surface costs $10,000, maybe more. I doubt I’ll be buying one any time soon.
How Dentists Deceive? →
faz.net
On the edge of legality
I have never seen anything like this before, an
~~~~ interactive graphic of a dental bill ~~~~Might it be the very first of its kind?
Online Tracking Jumps →
online.wsj.com
Online tracking on 50 of the most-visited websites has risen sharply since 2010… The average visit to a Web page triggered 56 instances of data collection, up from just 10 instances when Krux conducted its initial study, in November 2010.
The article refers to results from Krux’s most recent study, in December 2011.
The use of (automated) online auctions by advertisers competing to purchase website visitor’s behavioral data is disturbing. Certainly the sharp increase in usage of this method is disquieting.
In real-time bidding, as soon as a user visits a Web page, the visit is auctioned to the highest bidder, based on… the type of page visited or previous web browsing by the user. To make the auctions work, advertising companies are racing to place tracking technology on as many websites as possible. That technology gives them user and Web-page data to sell.
A lot of energy and effort is being focused on what seems to be a shrinking pool of potential customers:
We’ve moved from a traditional advertising model of buying 1,000 impressions. Now you evaluate and buy a single impression.
This could be due to improvements in big data (“data harvesting”) and analysis methods.
It DOES seem odd to me, that for such a huge growth area as e-commerce, there would be competition at a single-user impression level. This is especially curious, given that it was three orders of magnitude higher, just a few years ago.
Why?
Is it due to a diminishing pool of potential customers? Fewer clicks on banner ads overall? Or something else that I haven’t even thought of.
Redundant power systems are hard →
c1qfxugcgy0.tumblr.com
http://status.aws.amazon.com/rss/ec2-us-east-1.rss
At approximately 8:44PM PDT, there was a cable fault in the high voltage Utility power distribution system. Two Utility substations that feed the impacted Availability Zone went offline, causing the entire Availability Zone to fail over to…
I guess that was the reason for affected AWS Elastic Block System customers to receive this messages:
Your EBS volume vol-xxxxxxxx
Your volume may have experienced data inconsistency issues due to failures during the 6/14/2012 power failure in the US-EAST-1 region. To restore access to your data, we will re-enable IO no later than 6/19/2012 at 9AM PDT. Alternatively, you can re-enable IO on your volume earlier by using the console. We recommend you validate consistency of your data with a tool such as fsck or chkdsk.
For more information see:
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, User Guide (API Version 2012-06-01) » Monitoring the Status of Your Volumes.
May you never have to work with an impaired volume.
