Progressology

via azspot

37) Personal reinvention
How can you forge a new identity at university when your Facebook is plastered with photos of the “old” you?

50) Your lunchbreak
Did you leave your desk today? Or snaffle a sandwich while sending a few personal emails and checking the price of a week in Istanbul?

ledgergermane:

• “Nearly everyone on Wall Street is wondering how hedge funds and large banks like Goldman Sachs are making so much money so soon after the financial system nearly collapsed,” writes the New York Times’ Charles Duhigg in a front page piece that’s been the talk of the town in New York and Washington. “High-frequency trading is one answer.” Duhigg writes, “High-frequency trading systems are so fast they can outsmart or outrun other investors, humans and computers alike.”
• The term “high-frequency” refers to fast entry and exit of trading positions, the process best executed by algorithms and dedicated computer programs employing artificial intelligence. However, this can turn into the intentional probing of the market with tiny orders that are immediately canceled at speeds that cannot be matched by individual human investors.
• While this isn’t quite the “intelligence explosion” of machines foreseen by I.J. Good in 1965 and dubbed “the Singularity” by Vernor Vinge in 1993, the speed and sophistication of Goldman Sachs computer algorithms are indeed leaving humans –- at least, individual investors –- in the dust.
• Flash orders allow certain members of these exchanges to obtain access to order flow information before that information is made available to the public,” writes Schumer. This allows “those members to use rapid trading programs to trade ahead of those orders and profit from advanced knowledge of buying and selling activity.”
• Regardless of the debate over how HFT is used in market trading, it’s clear that supercomputers can already “outrun and outsmart” individual investors. This isn’t quite the Singularity envisioned by Good and Vinge, but it raises some perplexing questions about the use of artificial intelligence to gain market advantage when individual humans “with slide rules” cannot compete.

With this new Reader, Sony’s unashamedly gunning after the Kindle—the 3G and superior touchscreen tech point to this, and its use of the open-source EPub format is an attempt to stop Amazon from completely establishing itself as a monopoly provider for e-books in a proprietary format in the U.S. The one decider for all this is the price of the gizmo. Sony’s smaller non-3G Readers, the 5-inch Pocket and 6-inch Touch go for $199 and $299, while the Kindle 2 is $299 and the DX is $489. Sony’s not saying yet how much the Reader DE will go for, but if it manages a $399 price tag (as Gdgt is suggesting), then Amazon will definitely have a hot competitor on its hands.