Wrong way around. The rate is 1.4% that of the sun, so the sun takes 1.4% of 39ns to emit the same energy. Thus, the sun requires 39000 picoseconds x 0.014, or about 500 picoseconds to emit that energy.
Everyone pointing out that Greenpeace are stupid power-hungry jerks whose opposition to nuclear power is an environmental disaster is right.
Now they are doing it again. This time, they have been opposition to genetically modified crops, with (once more) no good scientific or environmental reason. And once again, they try to whip up public sentiment with scare stories. It worked on a bunch of europeans this round, but failed in the USA.
I work in the finance industry, and know a few things about this business. It can be very profitable indeed. Since the HF trades are typically finished at the end of each day (or even minute), they are not required to hold much cash (capital) to support their positions. Thus the business is unusual in the finance world for making a profit on, essentially, zero capital. Of course, it costs a lot of money to stay in the arms race.
The article hints at two kinds of HF strategies, and they really are distinct. First, there are the "rebate" strategies that collect those credits for providing markets. Then, there are the "predatory" strategies that try to find the price points of buyers and sellers as described. Other HF strategies include pairs trades (Exxon goes up so RIG will soon), inter-exchange arbitrage where a stock is traded on multiple exchanges, and index arbitrage such as trading the elements of the S&P 500 against the index futures (which has been around almost forever).
Other algorithmic trading includes strategies meant to take on positions slowly (or quickly) and efficiently. A famous old category are the Volume Weighted Average Price (VWAP) strategies that try to trade a little bit at a time throughout the day, so that the average trade price is close to the day's average. Other algos try to take advantage of mean reversion or trends during the day.
There is huge demand for technical people in this industry (I probably get one headhunter call every two weeks), almost all of it in NYC or Chicago. There's demand for network engineers, statisticians, programmers, and traders, and high pay for quality. Surprisingly few programmers these days are really acceptable to the business, because the code has to be so fast and efficient, and almost no one studies that any more.
As the owner of a.org domain (used for a few websites and email) is there anything I ought to be doing based on this? I'm registered at Dotster, hosted elsewhere (Dreamhost).
I work for a huge corporation. Since the sysadmins have nothing better to do, they just this month automated a company-wide process of deleting Firefox from all workstations, forcing users to go to IE6 (with alternate browsers available only for web developers)!
A great way to set yourself up with a Python-based analysis environment is a tool amalgamation called Python(x,y). I don't use it myself since my setup predates the project, but it has all the major tools I know and love.
And for those of you who want statistical and graphing capabilities lacking there, know that you can communicate back and forth with an instance of GNU R, using rpy2.
Most of those Bermuda/Cayman holding companies exist not to avoid taxes entirely, but rather to keep the US from double-taxing profits that have already been taxed once by Europe/Asia, which is what the US does when this offshore trick isn't used.
It seems likely to me that if US companies can't do that any longer, many will cease to be US companies. It's not that hard to move HQ to Ireland or Canada or wherever. Then the US can become a nation of grunt workers while the real power and intellect (and taxable personal income) is abroad.
Dish Satellite's cheapest service provides none of the channels he listed, save PBS. Plus, it is compressed all to hell. I just canceled it myself, and went to OTA broadcast.
We have an algorithm for pricing options (Black-Scholes) that makes an invalid assumption (it uses Gaussian statistics where it shouldn't). This fault was recognized almost as soon as it was published, but people continue to use it anyway, which means they're mis-pricing their options.
Actually, almost anyone trading in options knows about and uses volatility skew. It is easy to show that this is equivalent to using a non-Gaussian PDF (in practice, it's always fat-tailed except in certain very special cases like the VIX).
So Taleb's trades were equivalent to betting that the existing vol skew was not enough. Was he right about that? I dunno -- he's crowed a lot about his 2 year returns but is suspiciously silent about his 10 year returns.
Hey, you gotta see it from a statistician's point of view. Catching 90% of the criminals takes 10% effort. Catching the other 10% takes 90% effort.... Bottom line: You only catch the dumb criminals.
Well, not only, but largely. They caught Ted Kaczynski, after all, but it took them dozens of agents and many years. He is way on the smart end of the criminal scale.
The problem with ignoring North Korea is that they'll collect hard currency by selling scary weapons to anybody who can pay -- including those who want to burn cities or foment wars.
The South Koreans are no help with this. They're worried about the economic and possible military consequences of North Korean collapse and are constantly spoiling arms control efforts. They're perfectly happy to let the rest of the world suffer proliferation of nuclear weapons. They tend to take these missile tests as a point of pride, really, just like lots of countries were happy to see Pakistan test a "muslim bomb".
I've been planning on doing an HTPC this month. I had half-settled on Plex -- XBMC for OSX -- on a Mac Mini when I heard about Boxee. Does anybody have experience of both, and would you be willing to share opinions?
From what I understand, Boxee is good for watching web video, and sharing video recommendations among your "friends" on social networking sites. XBMC is better for dealing with libraries of locally stored media and the like. And neither is all that good as a DVR.
Am I right? And since it's the DVR (based on talking to an HDHomeRun) that interests me most, I'm kind of torn. But I lack the time to really give both options a full workout.
I think the Slashdot crowd is showing too much of its human side here, and not enough of the geeky analytics that bring me here.
As the old saying goes, it's not how well the bear dances, but that it dances at all. I watched the demo and thought that Songsmith must have some *very* interesting algorithms behind it. Sure, the music sounds trite to the human ear, but aren't you kind of amazed at how much is done?
To analogize, think of recognition technology. I can't tell one raccoon (or orangutang or giraffe or shrew) from another. Anyone who makes software that *can* do so has some mad skillz in my book, regardless of the human utility.
I read the essay, and though I share Gatto's dislike of regimentation, it basically comes off as a rant. I'm a big believer in Montessori-type schooling, but also in the idea that most children will not bother to learn, e.g. high-school geometry without prodding from the system. I choose the geometry example because it is most people's first introduction to nontrivial logic. And I know that my classmates resisted it.
Gatto implies that every child will become an amazing intellectual butterfly, if only their education can be sufficiently free-from. Judging from the homeschooled people and kids I know, from the average curiosity and intelligence of the uneducated, and from the world's 5B population, I think he is wrong.
As an ecosystem, Matlab is no superset. There are a lot of packages available for R that are either not available in Matlab or are of far poorer quality.
I kind of suspect that Taleb's hedge fund is still underwater for long-term investors. I've seen many articles quoting him crowing about this year's returns, often with fairly specific ranges elsewhere in the article. And yet, nowhere has anyone cited, say, 5 or 10 year returns. The obvious conclusion is that he has still done poorly overall.
I am skeptical that whatever wealth Taleb has is due to any unusually great talent -- many untalented people have gotten wealthy in the financial markets, which pay for fame in addition to talent (albeit in different proportions to Hollywood).
There is academic research showing that the opposite of Taleb's strategy (basically, constantly selling SP500 puts) is a money-making strategy over long time periods, provided you can insulate yourself against the bankruptcy risk, for example by using no leverage. That's another reason to think he has lost money.
education majors--the majority of public school teachers--are one of the bottom five majors when ranked by intelligence and test scores
That's probably an insidious reason for teachers' (and teachers' unions) zealous opposition to testing. No one truly thinks of him- or herself as a moron, so in many of their minds the tests are flawed.
And by the way I know some very intelligent elementary and high school teachers, along with some stupid ones.
Just as a point of information, Radio Shack credit default swaps are trading for less than 3% per year, indicating a relatively small likelihood of default. And we all know the market is never wrong about these things....
If you are the physics Mark who previously worked on KhiMetriks I would like to talk to you. Assuming you're willing, please email me at org.boonstra #a# finance (suitable reversed). Thanks!
I'm a quant in the finance industry, and while I mainly use R, SciPy and Matlab for my quantitative work, I also use quite a bit of Excel. And I think the linked diatribe above is mostly BS. I like the point about data/formula ambiguity, but that's about it.
The essay is very one-sided, ignoring all the difficulties of using a programming language for those who lack the proper mindset. This industry is full of people who just cannot think that way, and yet can create a useful spreadsheet, particularly when the complex stuff is done by a shared library underneath.
Also, Excel is a reliable way of sharing information and models with other people, in the sense that most people in the business world can be relied upon to have a copy already installed on their workstation. Thus I have sometimes found myself going through the agonizing work of implementing a model in Excel, solely for the purpose of sharing it. Doing the same in Python/SciPy is theoretically possible, but few people with bother communicating with you in this way if they do not already use it.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong way around. The rate is 1.4% that of the sun, so the sun takes 1.4% of 39ns to emit the same energy. Thus, the sun requires 39000 picoseconds x 0.014, or about 500 picoseconds to emit that energy.
Everyone pointing out that Greenpeace are stupid power-hungry jerks whose opposition to nuclear power is an environmental disaster is right.
Now they are doing it again. This time, they have been opposition to genetically modified crops, with (once more) no good scientific or environmental reason. And once again, they try to whip up public sentiment with scare stories. It worked on a bunch of europeans this round, but failed in the USA.
I work in the finance industry, and know a few things about this business. It can be very profitable indeed. Since the HF trades are typically finished at the end of each day (or even minute), they are not required to hold much cash (capital) to support their positions. Thus the business is unusual in the finance world for making a profit on, essentially, zero capital. Of course, it costs a lot of money to stay in the arms race.
The article hints at two kinds of HF strategies, and they really are distinct. First, there are the "rebate" strategies that collect those credits for providing markets. Then, there are the "predatory" strategies that try to find the price points of buyers and sellers as described. Other HF strategies include pairs trades (Exxon goes up so RIG will soon), inter-exchange arbitrage where a stock is traded on multiple exchanges, and index arbitrage such as trading the elements of the S&P 500 against the index futures (which has been around almost forever).
Other algorithmic trading includes strategies meant to take on positions slowly (or quickly) and efficiently. A famous old category are the Volume Weighted Average Price (VWAP) strategies that try to trade a little bit at a time throughout the day, so that the average trade price is close to the day's average. Other algos try to take advantage of mean reversion or trends during the day.
There is huge demand for technical people in this industry (I probably get one headhunter call every two weeks), almost all of it in NYC or Chicago. There's demand for network engineers, statisticians, programmers, and traders, and high pay for quality. Surprisingly few programmers these days are really acceptable to the business, because the code has to be so fast and efficient, and almost no one studies that any more.
For most users, it doesn't. The GP is apparently not familiar with numpy.
As the owner of a .org domain (used for a few websites and email) is there anything I ought to be doing based on this? I'm registered at Dotster, hosted elsewhere (Dreamhost).
I work for a huge corporation. Since the sysadmins have nothing better to do, they just this month automated a company-wide process of deleting Firefox from all workstations, forcing users to go to IE6 (with alternate browsers available only for web developers)!
I was gobsmacked.
A great way to set yourself up with a Python-based analysis environment is a tool amalgamation called Python(x,y). I don't use it myself since my setup predates the project, but it has all the major tools I know and love.
And for those of you who want statistical and graphing capabilities lacking there, know that you can communicate back and forth with an instance of GNU R, using rpy2.
Evil and brilliant!
Most of those Bermuda/Cayman holding companies exist not to avoid taxes entirely, but rather to keep the US from double-taxing profits that have already been taxed once by Europe/Asia, which is what the US does when this offshore trick isn't used.
It seems likely to me that if US companies can't do that any longer, many will cease to be US companies. It's not that hard to move HQ to Ireland or Canada or wherever. Then the US can become a nation of grunt workers while the real power and intellect (and taxable personal income) is abroad.
Dish Satellite's cheapest service provides none of the channels he listed, save PBS. Plus, it is compressed all to hell. I just canceled it myself, and went to OTA broadcast.
Hey, look! Something shiny!
We have an algorithm for pricing options (Black-Scholes) that makes an invalid assumption (it uses Gaussian statistics where it shouldn't). This fault was recognized almost as soon as it was published, but people continue to use it anyway, which means they're mis-pricing their options.
Actually, almost anyone trading in options knows about and uses volatility skew. It is easy to show that this is equivalent to using a non-Gaussian PDF (in practice, it's always fat-tailed except in certain very special cases like the VIX).
So Taleb's trades were equivalent to betting that the existing vol skew was not enough. Was he right about that? I dunno -- he's crowed a lot about his 2 year returns but is suspiciously silent about his 10 year returns.
Hey, you gotta see it from a statistician's point of view. Catching 90% of the criminals takes 10% effort. Catching the other 10% takes 90% effort. ...
Bottom line: You only catch the dumb criminals.
Well, not only, but largely. They caught Ted Kaczynski, after all, but it took them dozens of agents and many years. He is way on the smart end of the criminal scale.
The problem with ignoring North Korea is that they'll collect hard currency by selling scary weapons to anybody who can pay -- including those who want to burn cities or foment wars.
The South Koreans are no help with this. They're worried about the economic and possible military consequences of North Korean collapse and are constantly spoiling arms control efforts. They're perfectly happy to let the rest of the world suffer proliferation of nuclear weapons. They tend to take these missile tests as a point of pride, really, just like lots of countries were happy to see Pakistan test a "muslim bomb".
The summary misses one of the best bits -- the project will try to get rid of the Global Interpreter Lock that interferes so much with multithreading.
Also, it's based on v2.6, which they are hoping will make 3.x an easy change.
I've been planning on doing an HTPC this month. I had half-settled on Plex -- XBMC for OSX -- on a Mac Mini when I heard about Boxee. Does anybody have experience of both, and would you be willing to share opinions?
From what I understand, Boxee is good for watching web video, and sharing video recommendations among your "friends" on social networking sites. XBMC is better for dealing with libraries of locally stored media and the like. And neither is all that good as a DVR.
Am I right? And since it's the DVR (based on talking to an HDHomeRun) that interests me most, I'm kind of torn. But I lack the time to really give both options a full workout.
I think the Slashdot crowd is showing too much of its human side here, and not enough of the geeky analytics that bring me here.
As the old saying goes, it's not how well the bear dances, but that it dances at all. I watched the demo and thought that Songsmith must have some *very* interesting algorithms behind it. Sure, the music sounds trite to the human ear, but aren't you kind of amazed at how much is done?
To analogize, think of recognition technology. I can't tell one raccoon (or orangutang or giraffe or shrew) from another. Anyone who makes software that *can* do so has some mad skillz in my book, regardless of the human utility.
Meh.
I read the essay, and though I share Gatto's dislike of regimentation, it basically comes off as a rant. I'm a big believer in Montessori-type schooling, but also in the idea that most children will not bother to learn, e.g. high-school geometry without prodding from the system. I choose the geometry example because it is most people's first introduction to nontrivial logic. And I know that my classmates resisted it.
Gatto implies that every child will become an amazing intellectual butterfly, if only their education can be sufficiently free-from. Judging from the homeschooled people and kids I know, from the average curiosity and intelligence of the uneducated, and from the world's 5B population, I think he is wrong.
postgresql interface
gmm/mcmc
rpy
rodbc
As an ecosystem, Matlab is no superset. There are a lot of packages available for R that are either not available in Matlab or are of far poorer quality.
I kind of suspect that Taleb's hedge fund is still underwater for long-term investors. I've seen many articles quoting him crowing about this year's returns, often with fairly specific ranges elsewhere in the article. And yet, nowhere has anyone cited, say, 5 or 10 year returns. The obvious conclusion is that he has still done poorly overall.
I am skeptical that whatever wealth Taleb has is due to any unusually great talent -- many untalented people have gotten wealthy in the financial markets, which pay for fame in addition to talent (albeit in different proportions to Hollywood).
There is academic research showing that the opposite of Taleb's strategy (basically, constantly selling SP500 puts) is a money-making strategy over long time periods, provided you can insulate yourself against the bankruptcy risk, for example by using no leverage. That's another reason to think he has lost money.
That's probably an insidious reason for teachers' (and teachers' unions) zealous opposition to testing. No one truly thinks of him- or herself as a moron, so in many of their minds the tests are flawed.
And by the way I know some very intelligent elementary and high school teachers, along with some stupid ones.
Just as a point of information, Radio Shack credit default swaps are trading for less than 3% per year, indicating a relatively small likelihood of default. And we all know the market is never wrong about these things....
If you are the physics Mark who previously worked on KhiMetriks I would like to talk to you. Assuming you're willing, please email me at org.boonstra #a# finance (suitable reversed). Thanks!
I'm a quant in the finance industry, and while I mainly use R, SciPy and Matlab for my quantitative work, I also use quite a bit of Excel. And I think the linked diatribe above is mostly BS. I like the point about data/formula ambiguity, but that's about it.
The essay is very one-sided, ignoring all the difficulties of using a programming language for those who lack the proper mindset. This industry is full of people who just cannot think that way, and yet can create a useful spreadsheet, particularly when the complex stuff is done by a shared library underneath.
Also, Excel is a reliable way of sharing information and models with other people, in the sense that most people in the business world can be relied upon to have a copy already installed on their workstation. Thus I have sometimes found myself going through the agonizing work of implementing a model in Excel, solely for the purpose of sharing it. Doing the same in Python/SciPy is theoretically possible, but few people with bother communicating with you in this way if they do not already use it.