carapace – Not your father's america

Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com/article/ …

Mark Hulbert

Business and finance professor Terrance Odean is quoted in a story about individual investors and the question of whether it’s possible to outperform the market. Based on his studies of the behavior and performance of individual traders, he says that there used to be another human being on the other side of the trade when an individual bought or sold a stock. "Now it’s a supercomputer you’re competing with." He adds that some of the poorest performances in his studies were turned in by traders who were the most confident of their abilities, which led them to trade even more often and incur even more risk. This tendency, he says, often leads them to do precisely the wrong thing

May 02, 2013 

UN Report Wants Moratorium On Killer Robots

Killer robots that can attack targets without any human input "should not have the power of life and death over human beings," report says…   continue

FROM: LateWire

Risks of Friendships on Social Networks – Cuneyt Gurcan Akcora, Barbara Carminati, Elena Ferrari. DISTA, Universit`a degli Studi dell’Insubria, Via Mazzini 5, Varese, Italy

"In this paper, we explore the risks of friends in social networks caused by their friendship patterns, by using real life social network data and starting from a previously defined risk model. Particularly, we observe that risks of friendships can be mined by analyzing users’ attitude towards friends of friends. This allows us to give new insights into friendship and risk dynamics on social networks."

Computer Graphics Become more Realistic with New Rendering Algorithms

Glassware on a silver serving tray, illuminated by the above chandelier. Mitsuba makes it real by managing the complex path of light reflected by shiny surfaces and passing through glass. Courtesy of Wenzel Jakob/Cornell University

Computer-generated images can be a little more realistic — and a lot cheaper to make — with a rendering program created by a Cornell graduate student.

FROM http://www.scientificcomputing.com/ …

Stanford Report, July 19, 2012

by Max McClure

In a breakthrough effort for computational biology, the world’s first complete computer model of an organism has been completed, Stanford researchers reported in the journal Cell.

A team led by Markus Covert, assistant professor of bioengineering, used data from more than 900 scientific papers to account for every molecular interaction that takes place in the life cycle of Mycoplasma genitalium, the world’s smallest free-living bacterium.

Visit Stanford University for the complete article >

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Thanks to a new device, millions of people suffering from Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, muscular dystrophy, or spinal cord injuries could soon interact with their computers and surroundings using just their eyes. Composed from off-the-shelf materials, the technology works out exactly where a person is looking by tracking their eye movements, allowing them to control a cursor on a screen just like a normal computer mouse.

Read the full story.

FROM Tech Briefs INSIDER – 07/17/12