| Virtual Brokers | 11:50 PM |
Another interesting tidbit (no online article to link to)...a physicist and a mathematician at the University of Oxford designed a model that predicts the stock market. They equipped multitudes of intelligent agents with strategies that real life traders use to make decisions, then ran the model using historical stock market data, tweaked the agents so that predictions were more in line with the market's actual behavior, and now they're using it to predict the stock market and they claim it's accurate to the minute! And the model can be used to mimic other multi-component systems like medicine, using cells as agents, or ecosystems. A friend of mine was working on something along these lines...I wonder if he's still working on it and how he's doing :)
I always thought that seemingly chaotic systems had predictability in them, but it still seems surreal that you can predict the stock market. Wouldn't you be filthy rich?
| Name Recognition | 11:28 PM |
I was reading the new New Scientist and saw a quote from this guy I went out on a date with months and months ago. He was a graduate student at Berkeley studying genetically modified maize. And it's sort of cool to recognize someone's name in a magazine you religiously read. Because even if he's not a celebrity, he sort of becomes one at that moment. It made me think of this article I read months ago on scanning the brain to predict a person's behavior in economic games. It was a long ass Newsweek article about how, for humans, the emotional and rational parts of their brain affect their decisions, and how primates appeared to be hard wired to act according to mathematically derived formulas of economy.
The monkeys used Berry Berry juice as their currency. And looking at a "celebrity" monkey was worth paying for:
Male monkeys have a distinct dominance hierarchy, and Platt has found they will give up a considerable quantity of fruit juice for the chance just to look at a picture of a higher-ranking individual.
So it makes sense that humans do it, too -- because we do things like pay to go to movies, buy magazines and cable tv to see celebrities, pay for expensive dinners with politicians. And "celebrity" is subjective. Your celebrities might be actors or politicians or scientists or writers or musicians or tech geeks. Whatever your thing is, there's someone you consider a celebrity.
There's been a lot of research in the last few months about predicting behavior. And there's almost always a mention of what this means for marketing. Seems like in the end, we're all paying to look like or live like a celebrity. Whoever that celebrity is.
The end of that long article makes some interesting notes about the differences in the decision making process in men and women. Which I think is funny because I was just thinking about this article the other day when I was going over how long it took me to come to my final decisions -- even after I'd already made them.
| Burn Your Own Green Day CDs | 12:19 PM |
Now this is clever: blank CDs with Green Day album covers. So you can burn Green Day CDs on appropriately labeled CDs. 7.99 for 4. This is something I would totally buy into. I've got a huge stack of CDs with no labels except what I've penned in -- I burn everything I purchase on iTunes. And I miss the artwork of buying CDs in person (and the cases). I like that they're doing something especially for file-sharing fans. And they get to make a little extra money to boot.
| Secure Flight, CAPPS II's Replacement, Moving into Test Phase | 2:19 AM |
The TSA (Transportation Security Administration) has issued a legal order to "compel" airlines to provide passenger data to test Secure Flight, its new passenger screening system. Lots of quotes from the privacy officers at TSA, including one from Lisa Dean, ex-EFF'er. But the TSA hasn't been all that forthcoming with details, and what about the EU Data Protection Directive? How are they going to sort that out? The Practical Nomad has better, more in-depth blog entries about Secure Flight.
