Zblogray: Tech

Showing posts with label Tech. Show all posts

11 February 2011

Algorithms Take Control of Wall Street

Good/interesting/scary article I read on the plane lastnight...
"Algorithms have become so ingrained in our financial system that the markets could not operate without them. At the most basic level, computers help prospective buyers and sellers of stocks find one another—without the bother of screaming middlemen or their commissions. High-frequency traders, sometimes called flash traders, buy and sell thousands of shares every second, executing deals so quickly, and on such a massive scale, that they can win or lose a fortune if the price of a stock fluctuates by even a few cents. Other algorithms are slower but more sophisticated, analyzing earning statements, stock performance, and newsfeeds to find attractive investments that others may have missed. The result is a system that is more efficient, faster, and smarter than any human."

Full Article Link - Wired Magazine

(via Wired)

13 January 2011

Assessing the Fate of the 'Facebook Way'

Good read from CNET News a few days ago...

"We didn't always want to admit it, but in 2010 the world accepted that Facebook--the company that introduced us all to such mundane pursuits as photo tagging, virtual farmsteads, and the voyeuristic tracking of the lives of people we only half-knew in high school--has changed the world.

Yet Facebook has also begun to pioneer something different: a corporate structure and philosophy intimately tied to the mind of its young CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and the company's roots as a tiny cadre of coders in a college dorm. We'll call this "the Facebook Way." And in 2011 as Facebook continues to grow bigger (it kicked off the year with a $500 million investment from Goldman Sachs and Digital Sky Technologies, after all), we may get an answer to the question: Will the Facebook Way continue to work? Will this turn out to be one of the great business philosophies that other companies emulate, or will it prove to be a consequence of a still-young company's own naivete?"

Read the Full Article Here - CNET News

(via CNET News)

14 December 2010

The World’s Facebook Relationships Visualized

"Facebook intern Paul Butler was interested in the locations of friendships, so he decided to create a visualization of Facebook connections around the globe. How local are our friends? Where are the highest concentration of friendships? How do political and geological boundaries affect them?"
Article Link - Mashable
Definitely check out the larger view: High Res Image