A number of tools are around to improve decision-making by providing information. The latest, announced by IBM, is “stream computing“, a somewhat mysterious-sounding technology that aims to improve the performance of single-threaded applications on multi-core chips. The seemingly most important application is that stream computing can aid in analyzing digital data as it comes into […]
Daniel and Yuval’s posts at SocFinance continue to be very important to me, with Daniel’s latest striking a particular chord. I agree quite a bit with the sensibility of his post. Over and again, there are questions about the ‘organic’-ness of markets, can they be designed if they are found in nature. This was rehearsed […]
Summary: A study of the ontology of art prices. Art specialists act as market intermediaries who do the important work of making prices know-able. This project consists of two pieces, a quantitative analysis of the relationship between auction estimates and final prices, and a qualitative analysis of interviews with art specialists, private art advisers, and […]
One of the claims about commensuration is that it helps to resolve comparative issues by transforming quality into quantity. The art project I’m working on challenges this pretty fundamentally.
I read in June’s issue of Art News that Steve Wynn seems to have dropped his lawsuit with Lloyd’s of London over Le Rêve. If you’ll remember, this is the painting Mr. Wynn popped an elbow through while showing it to friends. His claim, interestingly enough, is that this reduced the value of the painting […]
One of the more insidious elements of commensuration is the normative push to treat what were qualitative differences as differences of common degree. For an organization engaged in a competitive marketplace, or a competitive reputational field more generally, this can be a problem.