That’s right, man. I designed and built this site in 1995, and that baby is still up on the USC internet. And it probably will continue to be up there until the end of time. Also, yes, that’s right, I did both the yellow circle image and the tight-roping stick figure. And the tiling, I …
After struggling with the internet over the course two decades for self-determination, businesses have decided that their best bet is to toss in (careful, that’s a .pdf) with Twitter and Facebook. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? (that last one is a .pdf)
I just want to let you know that if you are not using dropbox, you are making your life harder than it needs to be. This program has now saved my bacon at least thrice, and it is the most awesome kind of working cloud program – it is smart, so you can be dumb. …
Sure, this is more appropriate for my twitter account, but part of my social media strategy is to keep my Twitter followers under 15, and to post there only once a month or so…
From Felix Salmon (whose blog is so good it makes me not want to write anything, just point a big finger at him) comes a story that pops up from time to time. Usually it is some kind of technical snafu, when a trader sits on the keyboard or accidentally keys in a sell rather …
I would suggest that ‘objective journalism’ has always been something of an overstatement, an aspiration rather than a set of workable practices. Like ‘objective science’, there are – at minimum – choices of what to study and how to study them. Objective journalism has become something of a farce in the 21st century death-by-a-thousand-cuts age …
I’m just shouting out that I love my internet hosting service, Hosting Matters. If you ever decide to host your own domain, give me a shout out, and apparently I can get you a decent deal (and possibly get a referral credit). But I would recommend them anyhow. If you hate your current service or …
Three thoughtful posts from Martha, Daniel, and Yuval comment on the NYT article about Goldman Sachs’ high-speed trading unit. The rather critical article suggests that high-speed trading is the latest way to exploit innovation at the expense of everyone else, to the tune of $21 Billion in 2008. This issue is not new as such, …
In another frame of mind, I would say that some crowd-sourced reviews do make me happy. ‘Skip S’ reviews Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion on iTunes: Okay. Imagine sitting back in the day with none other than the Buddha himself. The two of you are discussing life, love, and various other zen things. Then, all …
It seems to me that one of the fundamental advances and problems with web 2.0 is that it poses expertise against aggregation. The ‘old’ system (and here I would say that these are overlapping, not coterminous ways of doing things) is one of expert reviews, or critics. You want to know what movie to see, …
One basic idea to help understand contemporary finance is securitization. To explain what securitization and how it works, first think about the following: what happens when you and your best friend decide to open a business together. How are you going to divvy up responsibilities, management decisions, profits, and losses? One way is to just …
Another story today about the relationship between technology and human discretion. Apparently, Google picked up an old story that was undated on the internet (really from 2002), and re-posted it as a story from today: that United Airlines was headed for immanent bankruptcy. Wanna see what happens when people suddenly think that you are a …
[Warning: this post is a bit long. If you're not interested, you can try instead the music stylings of Gary Numan.] In markets 2.0, I refer to the data that is generated as part of normal market transactions. The 2.0 references web 2.0, where the ‘social data’ generated by web interactions and transactions has acquired …
For my talk at the UCSD Culture conference, I spoke about market crises, commensuration, and market linkages. The slides are a .pdf of my keynote presentation, available here (the keynote presentation for those who can manage it, is a zip file available here). And this post goes along generally though not perfectly with the slides:
Two cases, separated by 150 years, about technology, missionaries, and institutional change: The first: In 1818 the directors of the London Missionary Society sent a mechanical clock to grace the church at its first station among the Tswana in South Africa. No ordinary clock – its hours were struck by strutting British soldiers carved of …
Put it on your radar screens, the next big thing is going to be XBRL. It stands for extensible business reporting language, and it is meant to commensurate business reporting via standardization. So instead of entering text into an annual report, companies, governments, NGOs, anyone who would like to comply with governmental mandate will be …
I’ve taken issue before with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s black swan thesis, that high-impact, low-probability events are responsible for market crises and accidents. The more general implication is, as Taleb and Pilpel note: What matters in life is the equation probability × consequence. This point might appear to be simple, but its consequences are not. Suppose …
As always, Technology Review provides a great glimpse at the innovations coming down the pike. In this case, by innovation, I mean the continued ascendancy of sociological insight wrapped up in physics, taken up by engineering, and brought forward as the ‘next big thing’: you can actually identify people’s social networking in real-time and help …
Well, this was bound to happen. I mention an article tells us there haven’t been enough data points for airline crash investigators, and a plane crashes. As usual, it was a mix of tech and happenstance – apparently, on-board computers sent a demand for more power to the engines, but they did not respond. It’s …