{ Alan Gevins and colleagues of San Francisco took electroencephalography (EEG) out of the lab and organized an EEG party - allowing them to record brain electrical activity from 10 people as they chatted and drank vodka martinis. The purpose of the study was to measure the effect of alcohol on brain activity. | Neuroskeptic | full story }
Mr. Arnuk is a professional stockbroker. But suddenly, and improbably, he has emerged as a leading critic of the very market in which he works. He and his business partner, Joseph C. Saluzzi, have become the voice of those plucky souls who try to swim with Wall Street’s sharks without getting devoured. […]
These two men are taking on one of the most powerful forces in finance today: high-frequency trading. H.F.T., as it’s known, is the biggest thing to hit Wall Street in years. On any given day, this lightning-quick, computer-driven form of trading accounts for upward of half of all of the business transacted on the nation’s stock markets. […]
Proponents of high-frequency trading call them embittered relics — quixotic, old-school stockbrokers without the skills to compete in sophisticated, modern markets. And, in a sense, those critics are right: they are throwbacks. Both men say they wish Wall Street could go back to a calmer, simpler time, all the way back to, say, 2004. […]
The two want to require H.F.T. firms to honor the prices they offer for a stock for at least 50 milliseconds — less than a wink of an eye, but eons in high-frequency time. […]
Mr. Arnuk then eyed the stock’s price on dozens of other trading platforms — private ones most people can’t see. Known as the dark pools, they help hedge funds and other big-money players trade in relative secrecy.
Everywhere, different prices kept flickering on the screens. Computers at high-speed trading firms, Mr. Arnuk said, were issuing buy and sell orders and then canceling them almost as fast, testing the market. It can be hell on human brokers. On the tape, the stock’s price was unchanged, but beneath the tape, things were changing all the time. […]
On the afternoon of May 6, 2010, shortly before 3 o’clock, the stock market plummeted. In just 15 minutes, the Dow tumbled 600 points — bringing its loss for the day to nearly 1,000. Then, just as fast, and just as inexplicably, it sprang back nearly 600 points, like a bungee jumper.
It was one of the most harrowing moments in Wall Street history. And for many people outside financial circles, it was the first clue as to just how much new technology was changing the nation’s financial markets. The flash crash, a federal report later concluded, “portrayed a market so fragmented and fragile that a single large trade could send stocks into a sudden spiral.” It turned out that a big mutual fund firm had sold an unusually large number of futures contracts, setting off a feedback loop among computers at H.F.T. firms that sent the market into a free fall. […]
Since the 2010 flash crash, mini flash crashes have occurred with surprising regularity in a wide range of individual stocks. Last spring, a computer glitch scuttled the initial public offering of one of the nation’s largest electronic exchanges, BATS, and computer problems at the Nasdaq stock market dogged the I.P.O. of Facebook.
And last month, Knight Capital, a brokerage firm at the center of the nation’s stock market for almost a decade, nearly collapsed after it ran up more than $400 million of losses in minutes, because of errant technology.
You could soon exist in a thousand places at once. So what would you all do – and what would it be like to meet a digital you? […]
It’s becoming possible to create digital copies of ourselves to represent us when we can’t be there in person. They can be programmed with your characteristics and preferences, are able to perform chores like updating social networks, and can even hold a conversation.
These autonomous identities are not duplicates of human beings in all their complexity, but simple and potentially useful personas. If they become more widespread, they could transform how people relate to each other and do business. They will save time, take onerous tasks out of our hands and perhaps even modify people’s behavior. […]
It might not feel like it, but technology has been acting autonomously on our behalf for quite a while. Answering machines and out-of-office email responders are rudimentary representatives. Limited as they are, these technologies obey explicit instructions to impersonate us to others.
photo { Frankie Nazardo }
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is in part an embodiment of the idea that in the quantum world, the mere act of observing an event changes it.
But the idea had never been put to the test, and a team writing in Physical Review Letters says “weak measurements” prove the rule was never quite right. […]
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, as it came to be known later, started as an assertion that when trying to measure one aspect of a particle precisely, say its position, experimenters would necessarily “blur out” the precision in its speed. That raised the spectre of a physical world whose nature was, beyond some fundamental level, unknowable. […]
They aimed to use so-called weak measurements on pairs of photons. […] What the team found was that the act of measuring did not appreciably “blur out” what could be known about the pairs. It remains true that there is a fundamental limit of knowability, but it appears that, in this case, just trying to look at nature does not add to that unavoidably hidden world.
I experience pleasure at work in the mainstream sex industry that I certainly perceive as ‘real’. This pleasure comes from physical sensations (lactic acid, endorphins, sweat, carpet burn, whipping hair, a double ended dildo angled against my g spot, real orgasms) but also from the thrill of voyeurism (exhibitionism, cameras, being naked in front of thousands of people).
{ The pricing wars were fought last month over a General Electric microwave oven. Sellers on Amazon.com changed its price nine times in one day, with the price fluctuating between $744.46 and $871.49, | WSJ | full story }
Women with resources are slower to marry and remarry, and are more likely to cohabitate with a partner. Women are also more likely to purchase homes on their own, build female friendships, and engage in community-based work. As women increase their earnings and status, women are also more open to date outside their ethnicity.
Five Ukrainian women, in an Ukrainian art museum. They are sleeping, or rather pretending to sleep, dressed up as Sleeping Beauty. Men come along and kiss them, on the lips, with each man allowed only one kiss. They have all signed legally binding contracts. If a woman responds to a kiss by opening her eyes and “waking,” she must marry the man. The man must marry the woman.
{ Marginal Revolution | Continue reading }
There are five Sleeping Beauties total; each takes turns, sleeping on the raised white satin bed for two hours at a time. […]
On September 5, the first Sleeping Beauty in Polataiko’s exhibition awoke to a kiss from another woman. Both of them were surprised. […]
Now the Sleeping Beauty must wed her “prince.” […] Gay marriage is not allowed in the Ukraine, however, so these two women will have to wed in a European country that does allow for same-sex marriage.
art { Gustav Klimt, The Virgin, 1913 }
The tumor that appeared on a second scan. The guy in accounting who was secretly embezzling company funds. The situation may be different each time, but we hear ourselves say it over and over again: “I knew it all along.”
The problem is that too often we actually didn’t know it all along, we only feel as though we did. The phenomenon, which researchers refer to as “hindsight bias,” is one of the most widely studied decision traps and has been documented in various domains, including medical diagnoses, accounting and auditing decisions, athletic competition, and political strategy. […]
Roese and Vohs propose that there are three levels of hindsight bias. […] The first level of hindsight bias, memory distortion, involves misremembering an earlier opinion or judgment (”I said it would happen”). The second level, inevitability, centers on our belief that the event was inevitable (”It had to happen”). And the third level, foreseeability, involves the belief that we personally could have foreseen the event (”I knew it would happen”).
images { 1. Joao Penalva | 2 }
In general, talking about sex with your partner may improve sexual satisfaction. But new research suggests that during sex it’s better to shut up and switch to non-verbal communication of pleasure.
photo { Larry Clark }
“I’ve always been interested in overdoses and addictions,” she says. […]
“I’m obsessed with cocaine overdoses in British society. They call it the ‘white death.’” […]
“I think my dust dealer’s in jail or something. Where’s my cellphone?”
photo { Ernst Haas }
In Glaser’s study of prison and parole systems, he puts forth the well-known argument that “almost all criminals follow a zig-zag path,” such that most individual criminal careers are characterized by movements back and forth between periods of offending and nonoffending. Even the more serious offenders are not “persistently criminal.” Rather, they are “casually, intermittently, and transiently” engaging in crime.
In the desistance literature, this has become a troubling issue: as a criminal career often includes stops and starts, desistance becomes difficult to study. Instead, some researchers have turned to the concept of “temporary desistance,” others to a distinction between “primary” and “secondary” desistance, whereas some have begun to explore the concept of “intermittency,” the latter of which is of interest in this article.
Intermittency has been described as “a temporary abstinence from criminal activity during a particular period of time only to be followed by a resumption of criminal activity after a particular period of time.” In this sense, the criminological concept of intermittency is similar to the cessation/relapse processes identified in research on drug use, but considerably less studied.
{ SAGE | PDF }
{ Melanie Griffith, Tippi Hedren’s daughter, and Togar, their pet lion | more }
If any product or investment sounds as if it has lots of upside, it also has lots of risk. If you can disprove this, there is a Nobel Prize waiting for you.
[…]
Legal documents are created to protect the preparer (and its firm), not you or yours: In the history of modern finance, no large legal document has worked against its drafters.
Around 60,000 years ago, modern humans left Africa, the cradle of our species. As we spread across the face of the Earth, we discovered that we weren’t the first or the only humans to make that sojourn. From Central Asia to Europe, we met our distant cousins the Neanderthals, descendants of a 500,000 year old migration; further east were the Denisovans, ranging from Sibera to Southeast Asia. Although these other humans died out around 30,000 years ago, some comfort can be found in the knowledge that a part of them lives on in us. Genetic evidence uncovered in the past few years suggests that our migrating ancestors may have mated with these other humans during their encounters. Not everyone was convinced, though, launching an ongoing debate about whether the genetic similarity might not be due to common ancestry rather than inbreeding.
still { Jean Seberg and Geoffrey Horne in Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse, 1958 }
Missing tourist in Iceland joins search for herself.
Texas mayor killed in apparent donkey attack.
Kim Ramsey, a nurse from New Jersey, has hundreds of orgasms a day.
Designer £185 menswear brown paper bag sells out worldwide.
Gay couple sues United Continental over sex toy incident.
Message in a bottle found after 97 years sets new world record.
75% of Homeless Youth Use at Least One Social Network.
Are Big Banks Criminal Enterprises?
Having to Make Quick Decisions Helps Witnesses Identify the Bad Guy in a Lineup.
Even while in a deep slumber, people can still learn brand new information. Sleepers soak in new associations between smells and sounds, knowledge that lingers into the next waking day, researchers report.
When do we lie? When we’re short on time and long on reasons.
People drinking beer from curved glasses tend to drink it faster than those with straight glasses.
A chemical in scorpion venom reduces the spread of brain tumor cells.
Redness enhances perceived aggression, dominance and attractiveness in men’s faces.
‘World-first’ bionic eye implanted in human patient.
Sugar molecules discovered around Sun-like star.
Indo-European Languages Originated in Turkey, Research Suggests.
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects.
Five Ways Science Can Make Something Invisible.
Could it be that “doing nothing” is a healthy teenage behaviour? [PDF]
How an iPhone announcement affects Apple’s share price. The old adage — “buy the rumor, sell the news” — doesn’t necessarily apply.
Samsung pays Apple $1 Billion sending 30 trucks full of 5 cent coins.
Quite naturally, when the Lehrer scandal first broke, the editors at Wired.com worried that his work for them was tainted as well. That’s where I came in.
The Women Behind Russia’s Literary Giants.
The haunting spectacle of crystal meth: A media-created mythology?
What If Hitler Had Not Come to Power?
Why did Michael Jackson get surgery to turn white? There’s no such thing as “surgery to turn white.”
Why is the sea salty and rivers and lakes aren’t?
My roommate turned a piece of a bowling alley into a dining room table.
Albert Einstein’s desk, photographed immediately after his death.
A coffin that washed up onto a front lawn due to Hurricane Isaac.
Ontological Nihilism is the radical-sounding thesis that there is nothing at all. Almost nobody believes it. But this does not make it philosophically uninterest- ing: we can come to better understand a proposition by studying its opposite. By better understanding what Ontological Nihilism is — and what problems beset it — we can better understand just what we say when we say that there are some things.
photo { Johnny Marchisi }
To be a ‘success’ in evolutionary terms, women need to have access to resources for raising offspring, and men need to have access to fertile females. Researchers have argued that women tend to prefer partners who have an ability to invest resources in their children (i.e., wealthy men), and men tend to prefer partners who appear fertile (i.e., young women) because evolutionary adaptations have programmed these preferences in our brains.
But in the modern world, ‘success’ is not necessarily tied to offspring, so researchers […] hypothesized that the influence of evolutionary biases on mate choice would decline proportionally with nations’ gender parity, or the equality between men and women. […] They found that the gender difference in mate preferences predicted by evolutionary psychology models “is highest in gender-unequal societies, and smallest in the most gender-equal societies,” according to Zentner.
The United States has slid into eight recessions in the last fifty years. Each time, the Federal Reserve sought to revive economic activity by reducing interest rates (see chart below). However, since the end of the last recession in June 2009, the economy has continued to sputter even though short-term rates have remained near zero. The weak recovery has led some commentators to suggest that the Fed should push short-term rates even lower—below zero—so that borrowers receive, and creditors pay, interest.
photo { Valeria Vacca }
