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, …
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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 …