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.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

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.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

photo { Frankie Nazardo }

{ 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 }

{ Weapon system patented by Aleksandr Georgievich Semenov. Soldiers inside an armoured tank, under battle conditions, can dispose of their biological waste products in an unwasteful way: encasing those materials, together with explosives, in artillery shells that they then fire at the enemy. | full story }

In the fourth quarter of 2008, Nokia, which had long been the phone industry’s profit leader, sold 113 million devices worldwide, about 15 million of them smartphones. It made about $1.2 billion in profit on all those phones. That same quarter, Apple sold just 4 million iPhones. But that single device earned Apple a profit of $1.3 billion.

These numbers provide the backstory to an industry in panic. If you were a phone maker watching the iPhone’s sudden rise in 2008, you had to make a quick decision. […]

One option was to do nothing. A lot of firms opted for this path—Nokia and RIM, for instance, seem to have decided that the iPhone was a blip, a cultish device that would never reach mass appeal. […] Another option was to try to leapfrog Apple. […] This was Palm’s idea. […] Then there was a third choice. You could just copy Apple. […] On Friday, a federal jury decided that Samsung was guilty of doing just that.

{ PandoDaily | Continue reading }

Facebook is planning on using Instagram to roll out a radical new advertising platform which is capable of following users’ emotions in real time and target advertisements based on how they are feeling. The platform - internally codenamed the Tom Parsons Project (TPP) - will “combine Instagram’s vast user base and high daily use rate with advancements in facial recognition technology to connect users with products which most fit their immediate needs.”

In the new TPP-enabled Instagram whilst you are taking a photo with your smartphone’s rear-facing camera the TPP software will discreetly activate the front facing camera and lock onto the image of your face. The app’s facial recognition function will then record the precise positioning of your facial features and send them to Facebook’s database where the firm will assign an emotion to the facial pattern and log your emotional state.

The company will then use a highly advanced algorithm which combines this new emotional data with the demographic data Facebook already has to create a near perfect ad targeting system. […]

“If you’re a woman with cyclical mood issues due to the harshness of your menstrual cycle, the new Instagram should be able to accurately predict when your cycle is peaking and connect you to valuable products and services which may reduce your discomfort before your moods become a burden on others.”

Privacy advocates are expected to protest the new technology, but legal experts say the method is legal in the United States so long as it’s disclosed in Instagram’s new Terms of Service Agreement.

{ The Daily Currant | Continue reading }

A tweet from a bogus account said that the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was dead. […] The account behind this Thatcher hoax amassed more than 32,000 followers before publishing word that the Iron Lady had kicked the bucket.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

If you see posts floating around the Twittersphere that the Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden is dead, don’t believe it.

{ Military Times | Continue reading }

You walk into your shower and find a spider. You are not an arachnologist. You do, however, know that any one of the four following options is possible:

a. The spider is real and harmless.

b. The spider is real and venomous.

c. Your next-door neighbor, who dislikes your noisy dog, has turned her personal surveillance spider (purchased from “Drones ‘R Us” for $49.95) loose and is monitoring it on her iPhone from her seat at a sports bar downtown. The pictures of you, undressed, are now being relayed on several screens during the break of an NFL game, to the mirth of the entire neighborhood.

d. Your business competitor has sent his drone assassin spider, which he purchased from a bankrupt military contractor, to take you out. Upon spotting you with its sensors, and before you have any time to weigh your options, the spider shoots an infinitesimal needle into a vein in your left leg and takes a blood sample. As you beat a retreat out of the shower, your blood sample is being run on your competitor’s smartphone for a DNA match. The match is made against a DNA sample of you that is already on file at EVER.com (Everything about Everybody), an international DNA database (with access available for $179.99). Once the match is confirmed (a matter of seconds), the assassin spider outruns you with incredible speed into your bedroom, pausing only long enough to dart another needle, this time containing a lethal dose of a synthetically produced, undetectable poison, into your bloodstream. Your assassin, who is on a summer vacation in Provence, then withdraws his spider under the crack of your bedroom door and out of the house and presses its self-destruct button. No trace of the spider or the poison it carried will ever be found by law enforcement authorities.

This is the future. According to some uncertain estimates, insect-sized drones will become operational by 2030.

{ Gabriella Blum/Hoover Institution/Stanford University | PDF }

photo { Alexander Hammid, Maya Deren, 1945 }

If you’re unusually insightful and perceptive, like me, you may have noticed that boastfulness is increasingly socially acceptable these days. […]

With so many more channels through which to manipulate one’s public image, it’s not especially surprising that we are tempted to present ourselves as positively as possible. The filters of social media make things worse. A network such as Twitter is designed precisely to connect you with exactly the kinds of people who don’t mind your boasts, while those who might keep you in check won’t follow you in the first place: your audience thus serves as an army of enablers, applauding your self-applause. […]

But, as the Wall Street Journal noted this week, in a worried piece headlined Are We All Braggarts Now?, the causes may be economic, too. In the most competitive job market in recent memory, the pressure to portray yourself as better than everyone else is intense. Predictably, there’s neuroscientific evidence to undergird all this: self-disclosure activates the same brain regions as eating or sex, according to research by Harvard neuroscientists.

{ Oliver Burkeman/Guardian | Continue reading }

photo { Charlie Engman }

Consider two questions. First: Who are you? What makes you different from your peers, in terms of the things you buy, the clothes you wear, and the car you drive (or refuse to)? What makes you unique in terms of your basic psychological make-up—the part of you that makes you do the things you do, say the things you say, and feel the things you feel? And the second question: How do you use the internet?

Although these questions may seem unrelated, they’re not. Clearly the content of your internet usage can suggest certain psychological characteristics. […] how often you email others, chat online, stream media, or multi-task (switch from one application or website to another)? Can these behaviors—regardless of their content—also predict psychological characteristics?

Recent research conducted by a team of computer scientists, engineers, and psychologists suggests that it might. Indeed, their data show that such analysis could predict a particularly important aspect of the self: the tendency to experience depression.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

Swiss scientists have developed an algorithm which they claim can determine the source of spam, computer viruses or malware by analysing a small percentage of network connections. […]

The researchers said the algorithm could also be used as a tool for advertisers who use viral marketing strategies by using the Internet and social networks to reach customers.

The algorithm would allow advertisers to identify specific Internet blogs that are most influential for their target audience and to understand how these articles spread throughout the online community.

{ CBR | Continue reading }

Previous research on gender effects in robots has largely ignored the role of facial cues. We fill this gap in the literature by experimentally investigating the effects of facial gender cues on stereotypical trait and application ascriptions to robots. As predicted, the short-haired male robot was perceived as more agentic than was the long-haired female robot, whereas the female robot was perceived as more communal than was the male counterpart. Analogously, stereotypically male tasks were perceived more suitable for the male robot, relative to the female robot, and vice versa.

{ Journal of Applied Social Psychology | via Mind Hacks }

photo { Barbara Crane }

Quantum computer scientists believe quantum computers can solve problems that are intractable for conventional computers. It’s not that quantum computers are like regular computers, but smaller and faster. Rather, quantum computers work according to principles entirely different than conventional computers, and using those principles can solve problems whose solution will never be feasible on a conventional computer.

In everyday life, all our experience is with objects which can be directly simulated by a conventional computer. We don’t usually think about this fact, but movie-makers rely on it, and we take it for granted – special effects are basically just rough computer simulations of events that would be more expensive for the movie makers to create in real life than they are to simulate inside a computer. Much more detailed simulations are used by companies like Boeing to test designs for their latest aircraft, and by Intel to test designs for their latest chips. Everything you’ve ever seen or done in your life – driving a car, walking in the park, cooking a meal – all these actions can be directly simulated using a conventional computer. […]

Now, imagine for the sake of argument that I could give you a simple, concrete explanation of how quantum computers work. If that explanation were truly correct, then it would mean we could use conventional computers to simulate all the elements in a quantum computer, giving us a way to solve those supposedly intractable problems I mentioned earlier. […] Quantum computers cannot be explained in simple concrete terms; if they could be, quantum computers could be directly simulated on conventional computers, and quantum computing would offer no advantage over such computers. […]

Quantum computers work by exploiting what is called “quantum parallelism”. The idea is that a quantum computer can simultaneously explore many possible solutions to a problem. Implicitly, such accounts promise that it’s then possible to pick out the correct solution to the problem, and that it’s this which makes quantum computers tick. […] The problem comes in the second part of the story: picking out the correct solution.

{ Michael Nielsen | Continue reading }

{ Horace Goldin sawing a woman in half. The magician’s secrets were revealed in the 1930s when he went to court to defend his signature illusion, much like Apple’s secrets are being brought to light in a patent lawsuit the company has brought against Samsung. | NY Times | full story }

Bioengineers have made an artificial jellyfish using silicone and muscle cells from a rat’s heart. The synthetic creature, dubbed a medusoid, looks like a flower with eight petals. When placed in an electric field, it pulses and swims exactly like its living counterpart.

“Morphologically, we’ve built a jellyfish. Functionally, we’ve built a jellyfish. Genetically, this thing is a rat,” says Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the work.

{ Nature | Continue reading | NERS/Discover }

artwork { Trevor Brown }

Most people think that even though it is possible that they are dreaming right now, the probability of this is very small, perhaps as small as winning the lottery or being struck by lightning. In fact the probability is quite high. Let’s do the maths.

{ OUP | Continue reading }

image { Dr. Julius Neubronner’s Miniature Pigeon Camera }

My theory, when it comes to buying lottery tickets, is that if you have disposable income to spare, then often the dreams and fantasies that accompany your lottery ticket purchase are in and of themselves worth $1. This is true not because dreams and fantasies are wonderful amazing and valuable things, although they can be; it’s more true because $1 is a very small amount of money. All too many people spend a significant percentage of their disposable income on lottery tickets, and that is a tragedy.

Now Ian Bogost has come along with a similar theory, relating to Kickstarter. Funding projects on Kickstarter is in itself “another form of entertainment.”

{ Felix Salmon/Reuters | Continue reading | Thanks Rob }

photo { Joel Barhamand }

{ Unlike a touchscreen interface, with Leap Motion, there’s no friction | Thanks Tim }

A man sits in front of a computer screen sifting through satellite images of a foreign desert. The images depict a vast, sandy emptiness, marked every so often by dunes and hills. He is searching for man-made structures: houses, compounds, airfields, any sign of civilization that might be visible from the sky. The images flash at a rate of 20 per second, so fast that before he can truly perceive the details of each landscape, it is gone. He pushes no buttons, takes no notes. His performance is near perfect.

Or rather, his brain’s performance is near perfect. The man has a machine strapped to his head, an array of electrodes called an electroencephalogram, or EEG, which is recording his brain activity as each image skips by. It then sends the brain-activity data wirelessly to a large computer. The computer has learned what the man’s brain activity looks like when he sees one of the visual targets, and, based on that information, it quickly reshuffles the images. When the man sorts back through the hundreds of images—most without structures, but some with—almost all the ones with buildings in them pop to the front of the pack. His brain and the computer have done good work.

{ The Chronicle of Higher Education | Continue reading }

photo { Michel Le Belhomme }

{ President Obama has dinner in Woodside, Calif., in February 2011 with tech leaders including John Chambers (Cisco), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Reed Hastings (Netflix), Carol Bartz (Yahoo), Steve Jobs (Apple), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook). | One year ago tomorrow, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings took the first of a series of missteps that angered customers and nearly derailed his company. Current and former employees disclose what went wrong. }