Wikipedia is one of the wonders of the world, which is why I donate to it as well as use and edit it. But until now I’d never thought of listening to the music that it makes.
Unmissable. Try it.
If I were an American undergraduate I’d say it was awesome, but now I discover that Wikipedia has no entry for that usage.
This morning’s Observer column:
At first sight, it looked like an April Fools’ story. The US Department of Justice is seeking to extradite a day-trader from Hounslow to stand trial on charges that he brought the US stock market briefly to its knees on 6 May 2010. Navinder Singh Sarao is accused of using a computerised share-trading program to manipulate the market for S&P 500 futures contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, thereby adding (so the prosecution alleges) to wider selling pressure that caused the Dow Jones industrial average to plunge briefly by 6% before bouncing back.
In that short interval, stocks in huge companies such as Procter & Gamble dropped by 25% and established companies such as General Electric and Accenture briefly traded as penny shares. The British courts, not to mention the rest of us, are invited to believe that this mayhem was caused by a 36-year-old geek in the bedroom of his parents neat semi-detached house under the Heathrow flight path.
There are, it seems to me, only two possible interpretations of this. One is that Mr Sarao is indeed responsible for the chaos. The other is that the US authorities have no real idea who is responsible, but need to make an example of somebody and Mr Sarao will do nicely. Either way, we are left with a really alarming conclusion, namely that we have constructed a world that is totally dependent on systems that are a) astonishingly fragile and unpredictable, and b) incomprehensible not only to the average citizen but to those who are supposed to regulate them…
YouTube turns ten this year. ArsTechnica has a nice post that reflects on its history and its significance.
Excerpt:
The site has become so indispensable that it feels like a basic part of the Internet itself rather than a service that lives on top of it. YouTube is just the place to put videos, and it’s used by everyone from individuals to billion-dollar companies. It’s obvious to say, but YouTube revolutionized Web video. It made video uploading and playback almost as easy as uploading a picture, handled all the bandwidth costs, and it allowed anyone to embed those videos onto other sites.
The scale of YouTube gets more breathtaking every year. It has a billion users in 61 languages, and 12 days of video are uploaded to the site every minute—that’s almost 50 years of video every day. The site just continues growing. The number of hours watched on YouTube is up 50 percent from last year.
It’s easy to forget YouTube almost didn’t make it. Survival for the site was a near-constant battle in the early days. The company not only fought the bandwidth monster, but it faced an army of lawyers from various media companies that all wanted to shut the video service down. But thanks to cash backing from Google, the site was able to fend off the lawyers. And by staying at the forefront of Web and server technology, YouTube managed to serve videos to the entire Internet without being bankrupted by bandwidth bills…
Great read. Recommended.
Fascinating piece in Slate.
At 7.32pm on March 27, Dama Mattioli, a reporter on the Wall Street Journal, tweeted thus:
“Intel is in talks to buy Altera. Deal would be largest in Intel’s history. Scoop w/ @danacimilluca coming to http://WSJ.com $ALTR”
Seth Stevenson of Slate recounts what happened next:
Quicker than any human seemingly could have done it, someone—or rather something—bought $110,530 worth of cheap options on Altera, a company that makes digital circuits.* Over the next several minutes and until the end of the day, as humans digested Mattioli’s takeover rumor at human speed, Altera’s stock price rose. When all was said and done, those cheap options had resulted in a $2.4 million profit. Speculation immediately centered on the idea that an automated program (a “bot”) had scanned the tweet, interpreted its meaning, and instantly bought those options based on an algorithm. The robot had read the tweet and made a killing on it before anyone knew what was going on.
In fact a Reuters report found that the trade in question was made a full 19 seconds before the tweet appeared. In a way, though, that only makes the story even more interesting. The WSJ has a policy of putting news on its own newswire before it goes on Twitter and it turns out that the trades occurred a mere second after news of the possible deal appeared on Dow Jones Newswires, and before Altera’s shares were halted.
Yep. A second.
Which means — or at any rate suggests — that an algorithm ‘read’ the news headline and acted to buy short-term options on Altera shares. Which is yet another pointer to what it happening to stock exchanges.
In her LRB review of Laura Thomson’s A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan, Rosemary Hill has an entertaining passage about two of Lord Lucan’s mates, Nicholas Luard and Dominick Elwes.
As the conventions of the 1950s loosened, hare-brained schemes were fashionable, though often doomed. The Establishment Club failed, taking Luard’s modest inheritance with it, and he and Elwes embarked on a succession of get-rich-quick enterprises. Their most entertaining failure was the retractable dog lead which Elwes patented. Since he and Luard were among the young men invited to dine (without wives) by Princess Margaret they thought she might be persuaded to use it when presenting prizes at Crufts to generate useful publicity. HRH agreed, but in front of curious photographers she put the spring-load on the wrong setting and all but strangled a chihuahua. Sales never recovered. Tellingly, the only Luard-Elwes venture to make money was their book, Refer to Drawer, a guide to confidence trickery.
That’s about par for the course for the rackety crowd of crooked or harebrained toffs who were Lucan’s playmates. In her review, Hill concludes that Lucan was not the murderer. I’m not convinced, and nor are some of the folks who have commented vigorously on the review.
Raymond Carr, the great historian of modern Spain, has died at the ripe old age of 96. There will be lots of respectful obituaries like this one in the Guardian. I wonder, though, if they will capture the racy essence of the man. I’ve lost count of the number of people who knew him in Oxford, all of whom tell barely-credible stories of his various adventures, one involving coming upon him working as a waiter in a Swedish cafe, where he had come in pursuit of a woman.
He was also the model for the academic in Joseph Losey’s film Accident, in which Dirk Bogarde played a charismatic Oxford don.
As you probably know, yesterday Google implemented its long-heralded algorithmic change to give more prominence to mobile-friendly sites in its search results. They also helpfully provided an online tool for checking whether one’s site was indeed ‘mobile friendly’ according to their criteria. So I ran the test on the previous version of this blog and — guess what? — it came out as being distinctly unfriendly. So there was nothing for it except to give it a facelift. Hence this new layout.
At the CSaP conference last week there was an interesting session on what (if anything) we have learned from the 2008 banking crisis. The consensus was not reassuring. The banking system we have now is still dangerously fragile, despite all the ‘stress testing’ of banks etc. And, as always, we prepare to fight the last war. Barry Eichengreen, whose book, Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, The Great Recession, and the Uses-and Misuses-of History, is a must-read on this stuff, said something bracing about this towards the end of the session. In the course of a discussion of where we should be looking for the early-warning signals of the next catastrophe, he said: “I think we’ve done a good job of putting in place an early-warning system for the last crisis”. (My emphasis.)
So what kinds of shocks could trigger another collapse? Two candidates were discussed. One was Grexit — the departure of Greece from the Euro and the chaos that would ensue from that. The other is a crisis in the Chinese economy triggered by a collapse in its housing and construction sector. A few days later, I talked to an expert on the Chinese property market, who poo-poohed the idea. And then, today, I find in the New York Times this quote from Henry Paulson’s new book, *Dealing with China:
“Frankly, it’s not a question of if, but when, China’s financial system will face a reckoning and have to contend with a wave of credit losses and debt restructurings.”
Note: not if but when. And Paulson is bullish on China!
