James Surowiecki:

Today, as financial markets become ever more complex, unanticipated ripple effects are more common—think of the havoc wrought a couple of weeks ago when the activities of one rogue French trader came to light. In the past thirty years, thanks to the combination of globalization, deregulation, and the increase in computing power, we have seen an explosion in financial innovation. This innovation has had all kinds of benefits—making cheap capital available to companies and individuals who previously couldn’t get it, allowing risk to be more efficiently allocated, and widening the range of potential investments. On a day-to-day level, it may even have lowered volatility in the markets and helped make the real economy more stable. The problem is that these improvements have been accompanied by more frequent systemic breakdowns. It may be that investors accept periodic disasters as a price worth paying for the innovations of modern finance, but now is probably not the best time to ask them about it.

Live with it!

Bonds Unbound

Our politics seem awash with hypocrisy, which leads us to suspect that honesty and integrity are increasingly rare qualities in public life.

But is hypocrisy really so bad? Given what it takes to get elected, and what we expect of politicians once in office, we may want to think again about political hypocrisy. Hypocrisy may not be an attractive human quality, but in politics, it is often a desirable one - and may sometimes be better than the alternative.

Vote hypocrite

As other high-tech companies cut back on their research labs, Microsoft continues to increase its ranks of free-rein thinkers.

“The outcome of basic research is insights, and what development people do is take those insights and create products with them,” Dr. Chayes said. “The two things are very different.”

Microsoft Adds Research Lab in East as Others Cut Back

Don't get so excited already. It's not like it matters.

It’s not that presidents don’t matter. It’s that they don’t matter nearly as much as we would like to think and they would have us believe. Mostly, they are trapped in realities not of their own making.

That's George Friedman.

Foreign Policy and the President’s Irrelevance

See also, from the archive:

You and Your Research, by Richard Hamming

PHD Comics: Your Research Interests

Now I can finally tell my non-technical friends and family what my company does.

New Unit of Reviewed Code Quality

A 2002 paper by Andrei Broder, now at Yahoo Research, then at AltaVista.

Classic IR (information retrieval) is inherently predicated on users searching for information, the so-called "information need". But the need behind a web search is often not informational -- it might be navigational (give me the url of the site I want to reach) or transactional (show me sites where I can perform a certain transaction, e.g. shop, download a file, or find a map). We explore this taxonomy of web searches and discuss how global search engines evolved to deal with web-specific needs.

A taxonomy of web search

Jeff Jarvis:

I believe the killer social graph app will be the one that sniffs and understands our relationships without our having to take explicit action or by exploiting the actions we take for different reasons.

The killer app is an exploit.

The internet is the social network

New from B. A. Huberman:

We analyze the role that popularity and novelty play in attracting the attention of users to dynamic websites. We do so by determining the performance of three different strategies that can be utilized to maximize attention. The first one prioritizes novelty while the second emphasizes popularity. A third strategy looks myopically into the future and prioritizes stories that are expected to generate the most clicks within the next few minutes. We show that the first two strategies should be selected on the basis of the rate of novelty decay, while the third strategy performs sub-optimally in most cases. We also demonstrate that the relative performance of the first two strategies as a function of the rate of novelty decay changes abruptly around a critical value, resembling a phase transition in the physical world.

Popularity, Novelty and Attention

Ultimately, you're just as hosed as Munich, but the next five years look good, apparently.

These cities, large and small, promise the best economic growth over the next five years.

Top 3
1) Austin, TX
2) Cape Coral-Ft. Myers, FL
3) Atlanta, GA

See also the slide show.

America’s Fastest-Growing Metros