For everything from family to computers…
Remember Knight Capital Group’s algorithm-driven stock trading glitch from yesterday?
Turned out that 45 minute mistake, the company said in a statement, “has resulted in a realized pre-tax loss of approximately $440 million.”
In other words, about $10 million per minute, which makes it a ridiculously expensive mistake.
from Ars Technica
A stock-trading algorithm gone awry appears to have thrown American stock markets into chaos on Wednesday, following a surge of volatile trading after the opening bell. Many of the country’s biggest companies were affected, including Bank of America, Alcoa, General Electric, Berkshire Hathaway, Citigroup, and American Airlines.
Financial news sites have pinpointed the problem to Knight Capital Group. The brokerage firm’s algorithm appears to have triggered purchases and sales of millions of shares for 30 minutes.
Algorithmic trading, where stock transactions are mediated by high-speed data connections and software rather than humans, is something that’s been rapidly overtaking the industry in recent years. The infamous “flash crash†of 2010 led to a loss of 573 points on the Dow Jones Industrial Average in five minutes.
from Ars Technica
The female badminton players have been booted from the London Olympics for purposely trying to lose. The players from Indonesia, South Korea and China had been charged with “throwing” group stage contests to secure an easier draw through the Olympic tournament.
from Morning Edition
Curing disease is really a matter of outfoxing evolution. When we assault bacteria or viruses or cancer cells with drugs, they evolve ways of resisting those drugs. We attack, they counter-attack. Take malaria: the Plasmodium parasites that cause the disease have repeatedly evolved to resist our best anti-malarial drugs. The mosquitoes that carry the parasites have evolved to resist the insecticides we poison them with. And now, Victoria Barclay from Pennsylvania State University has found that some malaria vaccines could drive Plasmodium to become even deadlier than it is now.
Several malaria vaccines are in development, but none have been licensed yet. Barclay vaccinated mice with a protein that’s found in several of these vaccines, and then exposed them to Plasmodium. After a few generations, the parasite became more ‘virulent’ – that is, it caused more severe disease. And it did so via an evolutionary escape route that is rarely considered.
Vaccine creators aren’t naive to the possibility of resistance. They’re trying to train the immune system to recognise and destroy Plasmodium by presenting them with proteins on the parasite’s surface, and they know that the parasites could …
from Discover Magazine
Renee Montagne talks with Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa about what can be done to regulate for-profit colleges’ alleged abusive recruitment policies and high dropout rates. Harkin heads the committee that conducted a two-year investigation into the colleges — and issued a scathing report Monday.
from Morning Edition
A power outage struck India’s northern and eastern electrical grids earlier today, hitting around 600 million people — that’s roughly half of the country’s population of 1.2 billion — cutting off electricity to businesses, transit and traffic lights, to name but a few. The power failure hit around 1pm local time “without warning” according to the electric company. The incident follows another major outage the day prior, which affected around 300 million people. Regions have taken to seeking out alternative energy sources such as hydro power, with local business utilizing backup diesel generators and the like, which have helped keep hospitals and airports in service.
[Photo by NASA]
from Engadget
Despite plenty of indications that the Earth has gotten warmer—like melting glaciers and ecosystems that are shifting toward the poles—there are a number of climate skeptics who simply don’t accept the temperature records produced by three different organizations (NASA, NOAA, and the CRU). Many of them pinned their hopes on physicist Richard Muller, who was also not convinced the professionals had gotten it right. But Muller did something about it, forming the Berkeley Earth project, and building a huge database of land temperature records.
Back in October, Muller dropped his findings in a rather unconventional location: an editorial in The Wall Street Journal. Despite the hype, the results were rather bland. He produced a temperature record that was nearly identical to that of the other organizations. But now, Muller is back for round two, and this time he has chosen the New York Times as an outlet for his climate musings.
As before, his team uses a different statistical method of reconstructing temperatures that works well with short records, taken at sites that were shut or moved. NASA, NOAA, and the CRU use methods that require long records, so they have to make adjustments to the data from sites that have shifted or gotten new equipment. This compensates for the fact that these changes will lead to discontinuities in the record. Since Berkeley Earth doesn’t need the same length, it can just skip adjustments entirely: any record with a discontinuity is just split there, and treated as two records. The team has now also pushed its analysis back to almost 1750, adding a century to the land temperature records produced elsewhere.
from Ars Technica