Here’s a wrapup of the past few weeks @Lab.

Party

The Party at Slate was a blast.

Featuring:

Feats of strength.

Demonstrations of skill.

Plenty of talk of tech and life.

And great drinks.

Springtime @Lab

There’s something to be said for older buildings and I’m saying it.  The windows open and the light in the kitchen is great.  The kitchen is filled with nutritious (and other) snacks.

UX Team Moves Out

The cool kids have left the floor, but they’re still in the building.  Most of the UX team can be found downstairs in their own space now.  The main office is regularly oscillating between empty and full.  Read more...

But, when will we get Silverlight on the iPhone? It took Adobe long enough to get Flash on the iPhone, surely Microsoft will have to follow with Silverlight?

CodenameWindows provides a nice list of Silverlight 4 RC features. My biggest problem with Silverlight 4…..Microsoft still don’t get streaming data

Looks like things could get interesting soon.

I’m currently reading the book The Dollar Crisis (more on that later), which discusses at length the consequences of the failure of Bretton Woods. (For those of you with more important things to do than study issues in global economics from the 1970’s, Bretton Woods was a system whereby the US dollar was pegged to US gold reserves, and all other currencies had a fixed exchange rate to the dollar. Nixon moved us off of this system.)

This prompted me to ask the question: how much gold do we have right now, and what could we do with that gold if we wanted to pay down some of our debt?  Read more...

Paddy Hirsch from Marketplace once again does a masterful job on the white board, this time explaining Repo 105, the latest financial shenanigan to hit the papers.

Repo 105 from Marketplace on Vimeo.

~alex

I recently came across this nice little visualization of the yield curve from Smart Money.

They call it The Living Yield Curve. It does a nice job of showing how the yield curve has changed over time. It also allows for overlays of typical yield curve shapes, and the average and latest yield curve for comparison.

I’ve selected the most recent inverted yield curve, which is commonly believed to indicate a coming recession, which occurred in February 2007.

~alex

Due to sickness, ill health and home equipment issues I have not been posting much of late.  I have been doing a lot of reading though.  In my literary travels I stumbled over this incredible posting that shows the kind of malpractice to which UK broadband services are subject.  Many thanks to Andrews and Arnold [...]

From the FT we learn that there will be not one, but two new movie exchanges where speculators and hedgers can bet on the profitability of movies: the Cantor Fitzgerald offering, HSX (launching sometime in late April, we assume), and something call the Trend Exchange, (coming out later this month).

Why these exchanges? From the article:

It will help film producers manage the risk that a film is not produced on schedule or is not produced at all; the risk that the production of the film exceeds its budget; and “release schedule risk”, or the risk that a film is not released on time and is late to market.

 Read more...

The FT reports that the CFTC is pushing for greater transparency for derivatives. Since many derivatives are indeed traded on exchanges, what they’re really talking about here are derivatives traded OTC (over-the-counter). And really what they mean is swaps.

Swaps, for those of you with weak memories (like moi) are those things which brought AIG low and had a not small role in our recent recession. They’re also the very things which appear to be pestering Greece and consequently worries the Germans and the French.

From the FT:  Read more...

Not sure how I didn’t see this before, but Google Finance now has a new(ish) feature called Google Domestic Trends. This is essentially Google Trends, but with the searched for keywords organized into useful concepts (i.e. retail, durable goods, automotive, etc.) and hooked into Google’s stock charts. This way a user can take a concept like travel and chart search frequency of travel related terms to a stock like Royal Caribbean Cruises (NYSE:RCL).

Percent change in RCL stock price and number of times Google search users searched on travel related terms, 2006 to present

Paul Mooney attended my NYC Code Camp talk and was nice enough to record and post the session. Thanks Paul!

Last week Greg Luck, the founder and now CTO of Ehcache, came from Australia and presented at the HPC/Cloud Computing Workgroup and the @Lab Seminar.

Shawn Gandhi, of Lab49 runs the Workgroup (that’s him above with the microphone and Greg Luck is standing behind the podium).  The workgroup is hosted monthly by Lab49 and Liquidnet.  You can get more information about their public meetings here.

The presentation was a highly technical talk about all things caching (including distributed caching and where it fits with various HPC/cloud architectures).  Greg talked about Ehcache and how it can be deployed in the cloud, EC2 specifically.  Read more...

In Bb

A friend of mine showed me this piece of code, gathered from a project he was working on:

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Guess for loops weren’t invented when this stuff was written…

Yahoo scientist David Pennock proudly presents his new baby, Predictalot. Despite the ridiculousness of the name (lets hope they don’t get a lot of Spamalot), it is quite different than any other prediction market I’ve seen out there.

As Dr. Pennock describes on his blog post introducing Predicalot:

Predictalot is a true combinatorial prediction market of the sort academics like us and Robin Hanson have been dreaming about since early in the decade. …

 Read more...