Nerd, meet Black Swan. Swan, meet Math Nerd.

They are the powerful, cerebral and offstage actors of Wall Street. They are the math geniuses of the quant funds.

Their complex and sophisticated mathematical models replace instinct. They try to turn historical trends into predictive science, using elegant mathematics seemingly above the comprehension of your average 401(k) participant or Wall Street fund manager.

Instead of veteran, market-savvy traders waving fistfuls of sell slips, the elite quant funds employ Nobel nerds with math PhDs, often divorced from the real world.

But the 387-point drop in the Dow Jones industrial average Aug. 9 and the continuing turmoil in the markets, in part attributed to massive sell-offs by the quant funds, have tarnished some of the quants' glimmering intellectual credentials and shown that, when push comes to shove, they can rush toward the exits as fast as a novice investor.

... The press-shy Simons would not comment for this article, and a Renaissance spokesman could not be reached for a comment.

For Wall Street's Math Brains, Miscalculations

How well does the MIT system work?

It should work pretty well. We have some of the best and most energetic lecturers in the US.

Lectures are generally kept to 50 minutes (more than double the limit established by education researchers). The lectures are demanding; if you tune out for 5 minutes, you will have a lot of trouble catching up. Professors do not put up PowerPoints and read them bullet by bullet. Homework assignments are weekly in most courses and are extremely demanding.

The students are among the most able and best-prepared in the US. Yet when you ask graduates in CS what percentage of their classmates are capable of programming and what percentage they would enjoy working with, the answer is usually 25-30 percent.

People who studied poetry, physics, or civil engineering are often better software engineers than an MIT CS graduate (contrast with medicine; not too many good doctors out there who skipped med school).

A MIT student graduates ready to work for an engineer, not to be an engineer. Not too impressive considering the near-$200,000 cost and the abilities of the incoming students. (And the problem is not always fixed on the first job; companies tend to give junior engineers a tiny piece of a big problem, not a small problem to solve by themselves).

Improving Undergraduate Computer Science Education

John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, on analogies.

The conflict raging in Iraq has been compared to many earlier wars, but the best historical comparison has been largely overlooked. Identifying the right analog is important, because it can help US government and military leaders anticipate what may come next in Iraq and make better judgments about what actions to take.

Remember Alan Kay:

At PARC we had a slogan: "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points."

I would add a footnote:

"This goes both ways."

Outside View: The real analogy for Iraq

If there’s one thing we know about government, it’s that it’s much harder to dismantle programs than it is to create them in the first place.

Why George Bush’s 'Freedom Agenda' Is Here to Stay

What percentage of your ancestors were men?

No, it’s not 50 percent, as I’ll explain shortly.

Is There Anything Good About Men? And Other Tricky Questions

Teeming with chatrooms, online discussion groups, and blogs, the Internet offers previously unimagined opportunities for personal expression and communication. But there’s a dark side to the story. A trail of information fragments about us is forever preserved on the Internet, instantly available in a Google search. A permanent chronicle of our private lives—often of dubious reliability and sometimes totally false—will follow us wherever we go, accessible to friends, strangers, dates, employers, neighbors, relatives, and anyone else who cares to look. This engrossing book, brimming with amazing examples of gossip, slander, and rumor on the Internet, explores the profound implications of the online collision between free speech and privacy.

Daniel Solove, an authority on information privacy law, offers a fascinating account of how the Internet is transforming gossip, the way we shame others, and our ability to protect our own reputations. Focusing on blogs, Internet communities, cybermobs, and other current trends, he shows that, ironically, the unconstrained flow of information on the Internet may impede opportunities for self-development and freedom. Long-standing notions of privacy need review, the author contends: unless we establish a balance between privacy and free speech, we may discover that the freedom of the Internet makes us less free.

Order at Amazon.

Solove's co-bloggers called WikiScanner this week's killer app. Another comment:

It probably shouldn't be surprising that Wikipedia entries are being manipulated in this way. If anything, it's more surprising that people seem to believe that Wikipedia entries can give them easy truth on complicated questions that require judgment, reflection, interpretation, and thought.

The Future of Reputation

Recommended by Ira Glass.

The Moth, a not-for-profit storytelling organization, was founded in New York in 1997 by poet and novelist George Dawes Green, who wanted to recreate in New York the feeling of sultry summer evenings on his native St. Simon's Island, Georgia, where he and a small circle of friends would gather to spin spellbinding tales on his friend Wanda's porch. After moving to New York, George missed the sense of connection he had felt sharing stories with his friends back home, and he decided to invite a few friends over to his New York apartment to tell and hear stories. Thus the first "Moth" evening took place in his living room. Word of these captivating story nights quickly spread, and The Moth moved to bigger venues in New York. Today, The Moth conducts six ongoing programs and has brought more than 2,000 live stories to over 60,000 audience members.

For a sample, consider Joe Lockhart. You have to listen to it, because the transcript leaves out important details. See Act Three of The Spokesman, episode 338 of TAL.

The Moth - Live Storytelling Performances

The economics of information security has recently become a thriving and fast-moving discipline. As distributed systems are assembled from machines belonging to principals with divergent interests, incentives are becoming as important to dependability as technical design.

The new field provides valuable insights not just into ‘security’ topics such as privacy, bugs, spam, and phishing, but into more general areas such as system dependability (the design of peer-to-peer systems and the optimal balance of effort by programmers and testers), and policy (particularly digital rights management).

This research program has been starting to spill over into more general security questions (such as law-enforcement strategy), and into the interface between security and sociology. Most recently it has started to interact with psychology, both through the psychology-and-economics tradition and in response to phishing.

The promise of this research program is a novel framework for analyzing information security problems -- one that is both principled and effective.

New from Ross Anderson.

Information Security Economics – and Beyond

About three percent of the world's population lived outside their country of birth in 2005.

Here's a look at the flow of people around the globe.

Snapshot: Global Migration

In Washington, the war on drugs has been a third-rail issue since its inauguration. It's obvious why -- telling people that their kids can do drugs is the kiss of death at the ballot box. But that was before 9/11. Now the drug war is undermining Western security throughout the world.

In one particularly revealing conversation, a senior official at the British Foreign Office told me, "I often think we will look back at the War on Drugs in a hundred years' time and tell the tale of 'The Emperor's New Clothes.' This is so stupid."

How right he is.

The Lost War