These relationships can be likened to the stock market where the valuations of particular stocks affect the valuations of other related stocks, and the only way to gain a gestalt view is to analyze and derive the interrelationships of the entire system.
This is impossible. First off there is structural error when you attempt to correlate returns-- the returns of a lot of instruments are far from normally distributed, and I have yet to see a factor model that even comes close.
Secondly, and more importantly, you are not receiving a complete picture if you just look at the numbers in the system. As we are speaking about the global economy, the 'entire system' you mention includes the actions of every single person on the planet as well as the weather, etc.
The quants aren't usually trying to predict the overall movement of the market. This is called a "Global Macro" strategy, and relies mostly on qualitative assessments. Quants mainly work on pricing inefficiencies (arbitrage), which can get extremely complicated. Check out When Genius Failed for an example of a quant-based strategy. (Financial purists please leave me that simplification).
Re:More technical introduction to Quant analysis?
on
My Life as a Quant
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It's a wide-ranging and extremely esoteric topic. I'd suggest you go look at Nuclear Phynance for some discussions on the different pricing issues, just to get a taste of the sort of stuff involved.
I wouldn't expect to see any world-beating techniques in any book you can find, because the industry is new enough that these ideas remain proprietary.
I'd wager the military contracts Boeing receives aren't as useful as the direct subsidies Airbus receives. Boeing has to design and build military planes with the money it receives from the US Government. Airbus doesn't.
On the other hand, I'm happy European taxpayers are subsidizing cheap aircraft for our market. In some very small way, it compensates for the burden US taxpayers have paid over the last 50 years of maintaining overseas military bases to defend Europe. I wonder how many of those military aircraft developed by Boeing are based in Germany now?
Well, as mentioned elsewhere, I think there is a legitimate concern about releasing email accounts to the next of kin: it's not clear that the deceased actually wanted his mom reading his email. This is an important issue.
I don't think it's in the least hypocritical for Google to scan emails for advertising but not automatically release addresses to next of kin because, again, we are talking about two fundamentally different meanings for 'access'.
We are, of course, assuming that Google would have the same policy as Yahoo. I can't see why it wouldn't.
The second issue, which I think is more surprising for a lot of people here, is that our email accounts apparently are not our property. It makes sense, but it's still a little shocking once your attention is called to that fact.
I don't care if gmail is using computers to do the heuristics. In concept, access is access.
Well, in concept, your shower-head has 'access' to your naked ass every day (assuming you have good hygiene). Do you consider that as invasive as a search at an airport?
You don't, I assume, because access by an uncomprehending machine with no memory is not the same as access by a person.
When I was at Columbia (2 years ago), they used to offer semesters in the Biosphere for astronomy and I think eco-studies. here's an article about it.
You'd think they'd be pretty pissed given the money they've put into it. Dollars to doughnuts the University they mentioned talking to in the article is Columbia.
Unfortunately, there's barely any market for it. I've been watching the ticks on it for the last 5 minutes or so, and it's all tiny lots, usually less than 2000 shares at a time.
I don't think the 'pump and dump crowd' would bother with this one, frankly. With volume that low, it'd take a trader all day to get in an out with enough shares to make it worth his while.
One wonders, who the hell is investing? It's not insider movements, either (at least, nothing big registered with the SEC). You can't even trade options on it.
I have no clue about this one, but I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot clown pole.
I work for a hedge fund, and our interns get two rounds: HR does one (and I hope checks references), then the actual group does one.
Back when I was in college, the top investment banks used to be significantly more gruelling, but I think they were just being dicks, personally. Lots of arithmetic and probablity questions, that kind of thing, and usually at least 2 3-hour rounds.
The sort of stuff we get interns to do at my current job doesn't take much more than general spreadsheet & data entry skills, so we usually just try to make sure they're personable, will stick around, and can tie their shoelaces. They're usually much more skilled than that, but with millions of dollars on the line, it doesn't matter. You can't blame it on the intern if they make a big mistake, so you can't trust them with anything important.
Out of curiosity, for what sort of position were you applying?
Re:Nutty brits... :-) Philanthropy, not a warrant
on
Sir Peter Molyneux?
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· Score: 1
I think a lot of the time, these honors are given because of charitable works, rather than the contributions a person made in his or her working life.
In fact, now that I click your link, that's just what he got it for.
It's not like there's a royal warrant on Windows XP, like there is on IBM UK and Xerox . Warrants are funny...
As for the impending bankruptcy of the US, you obviously don't understand how the trade deficit, the budget deficit, and the exchange rate work. Things won't be pretty, though it'll take longer than ten years for the situation to come to a head, but the US won't declare bankruptcy like Russia did in '98. Read this for a current analysis.
Recorded TV and Content Protection
Q. What is content protection, and how is it used by Media Center?
A. Content owners and/or broadcasters can set copy-protection flags to indicate that a program is subject to content protection. When Media Center detects that this flag is set, it will protect the content by limiting the ability to copy and distribute the program.
Q. Can protected recorded TV files be watched on another PC?
A. No, protected files can be watched only on the Media Center PC that originally recorded the content.
This suggests to me that the recording flag on, say, football games, will only stop owners of MCE from distributing their copy of the game. From what I've read on Slashdot, the flag is actually meant to stop all recording.
Are they just lying? I've been hoping that, as a poster above mentioned, the unfairness of DRM would enter the average American's mindset once he realizes that he won't be able to timeshift a lot of TV anymore. If the restriction is this more limited version, that won't happen. In fact, I might even start using MCE if all the DRM means is that I can't make torrents out of my recordings.
Out of curiosity, what topic for Ask Slashdot would be acceptable to you? It seems that every time we have one of these someone questions the motives of the asker.
It's not like he's asking us to give him a brief history of computing, with bibliography. He needs help from people with direct experience in an esoteric pastime, and I think he's come to the right place.
Christ, please, just once, give something the benefit of the doubt. Not everyone is out to take advantage of you.
Re:There's more than this to a good dictionary
on
Universal Free Dictionary
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If you'd like a good example of this, check out Whitaker's Words. It's a latin parser that does pretty much the morphological analysis you describe.
It's not perfect, principally because it doesn't have a convention to enter long vowels (the ones with a bar over them in latin), but it sure got me through High School latin.
That was back in '97 or so, and I see Mr.Whitaker is still updating the page, so maybe it's much better now. He was trying at one point to have the parsed latin translate directly into english; IIRC he was having more trouble constructing correct english than with decoding the latin.
I'd like to suggest first that even if corporations like Wal-Mart are evil, they might still be right about privatising schools or lowering the minimum wage. Assuming an idea is bad because one of its proponents is bad is called the ad hominem fallacy.
For example, the arguments that got everyone so mad during the presidential election, like the Swift Boat Veterans' claims and Moveon.org etc.'s counterclaims, were personal attacks, and as everyone on Slashdot noted at the time, irrelevant to policy decisions in the 21st century.
I'm not going to argue with your issues-- this thread is getting long enough already-- but I think you'll have more impact in the future if you said, for example, that privatising schools is bad because it will amount to government support of religious education, rather than that it's bad because Wal-Mart likes it.
To be honest, I think your attitude is more similar (though less sinister) to the evangelicals than you know.
I'm pretty certain that the New York Times, newspaper of record in the United States for over a century, does not need to seed Slashdot in order to drum up circulation.
One of the attractions of conspiracy theories is the flattery of imagining you are important enough to spawn a conspiracy.
Am I the only one in the WORLD who knows what the "N" in "PIN" stands for?
No, but you're probably the only one who cares. Just saying PIN sounds awkward to a lot of people, and PI Number sounds like something you take to wait in line at a bakery.
Meanwhile, there are so many more important things-- grammar, for instance-- over which to get your knickers in a twist.
Slashdot Mirror
This is impossible. First off there is structural error when you attempt to correlate returns-- the returns of a lot of instruments are far from normally distributed, and I have yet to see a factor model that even comes close.
Secondly, and more importantly, you are not receiving a complete picture if you just look at the numbers in the system. As we are speaking about the global economy, the 'entire system' you mention includes the actions of every single person on the planet as well as the weather, etc.
The quants aren't usually trying to predict the overall movement of the market. This is called a "Global Macro" strategy, and relies mostly on qualitative assessments. Quants mainly work on pricing inefficiencies (arbitrage), which can get extremely complicated. Check out When Genius Failed for an example of a quant-based strategy. (Financial purists please leave me that simplification).
I wouldn't expect to see any world-beating techniques in any book you can find, because the industry is new enough that these ideas remain proprietary.
Of course, once you get an immortality jab at 60, your time horizon for society to invent internal youth goes up 500-fold.
On the other hand, I'm happy European taxpayers are subsidizing cheap aircraft for our market. In some very small way, it compensates for the burden US taxpayers have paid over the last 50 years of maintaining overseas military bases to defend Europe. I wonder how many of those military aircraft developed by Boeing are based in Germany now?
I don't think it's in the least hypocritical for Google to scan emails for advertising but not automatically release addresses to next of kin because, again, we are talking about two fundamentally different meanings for 'access'.
We are, of course, assuming that Google would have the same policy as Yahoo. I can't see why it wouldn't.
The second issue, which I think is more surprising for a lot of people here, is that our email accounts apparently are not our property. It makes sense, but it's still a little shocking once your attention is called to that fact.
Well, in concept, your shower-head has 'access' to your naked ass every day (assuming you have good hygiene). Do you consider that as invasive as a search at an airport?
You don't, I assume, because access by an uncomprehending machine with no memory is not the same as access by a person.
You'd think they'd be pretty pissed given the money they've put into it. Dollars to doughnuts the University they mentioned talking to in the article is Columbia.
I don't think the 'pump and dump crowd' would bother with this one, frankly. With volume that low, it'd take a trader all day to get in an out with enough shares to make it worth his while.
One wonders, who the hell is investing? It's not insider movements, either (at least, nothing big registered with the SEC). You can't even trade options on it.
I have no clue about this one, but I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot clown pole.
Back when I was in college, the top investment banks used to be significantly more gruelling, but I think they were just being dicks, personally. Lots of arithmetic and probablity questions, that kind of thing, and usually at least 2 3-hour rounds.
The sort of stuff we get interns to do at my current job doesn't take much more than general spreadsheet & data entry skills, so we usually just try to make sure they're personable, will stick around, and can tie their shoelaces. They're usually much more skilled than that, but with millions of dollars on the line, it doesn't matter. You can't blame it on the intern if they make a big mistake, so you can't trust them with anything important.
Out of curiosity, for what sort of position were you applying?
In fact, now that I click your link, that's just what he got it for.
It's not like there's a royal warrant on Windows XP, like there is on IBM UK and Xerox . Warrants are funny...
While Mr. Yanukovich accused his pro-Western opponent of being an American stooge, he himself is quite blatantly a Russian stooge.
As for the impending bankruptcy of the US, you obviously don't understand how the trade deficit, the budget deficit, and the exchange rate work. Things won't be pretty, though it'll take longer than ten years for the situation to come to a head, but the US won't declare bankruptcy like Russia did in '98. Read this for a current analysis.
This suggests to me that the recording flag on, say, football games, will only stop owners of MCE from distributing their copy of the game. From what I've read on Slashdot, the flag is actually meant to stop all recording.
Are they just lying? I've been hoping that, as a poster above mentioned, the unfairness of DRM would enter the average American's mindset once he realizes that he won't be able to timeshift a lot of TV anymore. If the restriction is this more limited version, that won't happen. In fact, I might even start using MCE if all the DRM means is that I can't make torrents out of my recordings.
What do you guys think?
I would say it's a very good thing that Slashdot's editors do not consider a submitter's politics when considering an article about steam engines.
I looked around briefly online, but I couldn't find any study on the effects of Bluetooth. It seems to me that similar caution should apply.
Am I way off-base? Does anyone know?
It's not like he's asking us to give him a brief history of computing, with bibliography. He needs help from people with direct experience in an esoteric pastime, and I think he's come to the right place.
Christ, please, just once, give something the benefit of the doubt. Not everyone is out to take advantage of you.
It's not perfect, principally because it doesn't have a convention to enter long vowels (the ones with a bar over them in latin), but it sure got me through High School latin.
That was back in '97 or so, and I see Mr.Whitaker is still updating the page, so maybe it's much better now. He was trying at one point to have the parsed latin translate directly into english; IIRC he was having more trouble constructing correct english than with decoding the latin.
For example, the arguments that got everyone so mad during the presidential election, like the Swift Boat Veterans' claims and Moveon.org etc.'s counterclaims, were personal attacks, and as everyone on Slashdot noted at the time, irrelevant to policy decisions in the 21st century.
I'm not going to argue with your issues-- this thread is getting long enough already-- but I think you'll have more impact in the future if you said, for example, that privatising schools is bad because it will amount to government support of religious education, rather than that it's bad because Wal-Mart likes it.
To be honest, I think your attitude is more similar (though less sinister) to the evangelicals than you know.
One of the attractions of conspiracy theories is the flattery of imagining you are important enough to spawn a conspiracy.
No, but you're probably the only one who cares. Just saying PIN sounds awkward to a lot of people, and PI Number sounds like something you take to wait in line at a bakery.
Meanwhile, there are so many more important things-- grammar, for instance-- over which to get your knickers in a twist.