Category Archives: Technology and innovation

Guest Post: "Is the Securitization Crisis Driven by Nonlinear Systemic Processes?"

Reader Richard Kline, who provides regular, sophisticated comments, was keen to continue the discussion provoked by a post last week, “Hoisted From Comments: Greater Liquidity Produces Instability.” An anonymous reader offered a complex systems theory view of our modern financial system. The opening paragraphs: Perhaps a lesson to be learned here is that liquidity acts […]

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Microsoft Still Trying Evade the Rule of Law (EU Antitrust Edtion)

Someone needs to tell Microsoft to behave. By way of background, in December 2004, Microsoft lost its final appeal on an EU antitrust case in which it was found guilty of tying its operating system to its media player, undermining competition and hurting consumer choice, and for failing to give rivals the information they needed […]

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DNA Turns Relatives Into Genetic Informants

A Washington Post article, “From DNA of Family, a Tool to Make Arrests,” points to the increasing efforts to look for partial matches in DNA databases that might implicate close relatives. This is a disturbing development, since DNA, like other forensic evidence, isn’t as foolproof as its image in the popular imagination indicates. There have […]

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Trust Me, You Will Enjoy This Piece (Multitasking Edition)

A simply great piece, “The Autumn of the Multitaskers” by Walter Kirn in the Atlantic. As someone who nearly died while multitasking, Kirm is particularly well positioned to discuss the considerable downside and dubious benefits of our modern way of attempting to process inputs. It’s an informative and often funny read. A few representative paragraphs: […]

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New York Times on Innovation: Old Medicine in New Bottles

An article in today’s New York Times,” Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike, is oddly annoying, even though it makes a useful observation. Urganizations tend to develop routinized, and therefore hidebound, approaches, and involving an outsider is a useful way to shake things up. Framed this way, the article is an argument for bringing in consultants […]

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Internet Brown-Outs in Two Years?

It’s not as scary as having bridges fall down, but just as we have been neglecting our physical infrastructure, so to have we apparently been neglecting our technology infrastructure, in this case, the Internet backbone. The downstream providers are gearing up for, nay encourging, greater consumers use of bandwidth-intensive services like streaming video, without sufficient […]

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Fed’s Gary Stern Makes Lame Arguments Against Increased Credit Market Regulation

Perhaps I am attributing too much importance to a single speech, but the Minneapolis Fed President Gary Stern’s “Credit Market Developments: Lessons for Central Banking,” reveals a lot of what is wrong about the way policymakers are thinking about our credit crisis. And if Stern’s position is widely held within the Fed, we are in […]

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