happy chaos freedom machine

 The work of Duncan Watts, described in this article at Fast Company, has truly profound ramifications. In the past few years, Watts–a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo NASDAQ:YHOO –has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed [...]

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 Over at Mutating Pictures, Philipp Lensman started wit a pool of 1000 randomly created images, and is asking people to rate how much each image looks like a face. He put the site up yesterday, and look how far it’s come. There’s also a forum at Google Blogoscoped, where technical details and the implementation  are [...]

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Think I’ll buy this article: IngentaConnect Disagreement and the Stock Market, which attempts to catalog the types of “disagreement models” that describe patterns like …the tendency for stocks that have had unusually high past returns or good earnings news to continue to deliver relatively strong returns over the subsequent six to twelve months (and vice-versa [...]

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The market volatility we’ve experience lately is a symptom of significant changes in the global economy. It will take some time to understand precisely what is happening, but this article in Risk magazine may be describing one factor – higher reliance on algorithmic trading. Using robots to trade allows firms to move larger amounts of [...]

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The most puzzling & even troubling aspect of market dynamics – that the best experts can be out-performed by happenstance. This story of the leading contender in a CNBC stock picking contest is a good illustration. She’s a waitress who has no trading experience, who describes her method: “Part of this was luck,” she says. [...]

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