Category Archives: Technology

Domain hosting

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

High frequency trading, markets, exchanges

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,

more aggrevaluation

[this is a comment on

Speaking of reviews and recommendations

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

Aggregation aggravation

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,

Abstract finance: Securitization

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

Human eror or cmoputer error?

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

Effects of Markets 2.0

[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

A sociological analysis of the current market crisis

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:

They know the score

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