Category Archives: Technology and innovation

Media Consolidation Thwarted Again as Comcast Backs Off Time Warner Deal

Late Thursday, Comcast apparently signaled that they would abort a 14-month bid to purchase Time Warner Cable, in a deal that would have created the nation’s largest cable operator by a wide margin. The FCC was going to recommend a hearing, which is a prelude to cancellation. The spin is that there are more consolidation attempts on the way, but there’s no guarantee that they would be successful either.

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Rajiv Sethi: Spoofing in an Algorithmic Ecosystem

A London trader recently charged with price manipulation appears to have been using a strategy designed to trigger high-frequency trading algorithms. Whether he used an algorithm himself is beside the point: he made money because the market is dominated by computer programs responding rapidly to incoming market data, and he understood the basic logic of their structure.

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Bill Black: How the “Super Crunchers” Became the “Super Torturers” of Finance Data

Many of the concerns about Big Data focus on the surveillance apparatus used to collect it, or on the naive modeling approaches, like attributing causality to mere correlations. Here Black addresses an established problem: that of deliberate abuse of models.

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Can Voter Choice Technology Succeed Where Arab Spring Failed?

Yves here. As much as technology offers great promise as a way to create new routes for organizing, consensus-building, and decision-making, I’m not optimistic about the prospects for democracy in societies with no democratic traditions. Nevertheless, voter choice technology does seem more promising and lower cost than US adventurism as a way to try to build democratic muscles in the Middle East.

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