Latest Tablets (Luke Wroblewski) — table showing the astonishing variety of tablets released in the last two months.
Google Code-In Contest for High Schoolers — an international contest introducing 13-17 year old pre-university students to the world of open source software development. The goal of the contest is to give students the opportunity to explore the many types of projects and tasks involved in open source software development. (via Andy Oram)
Watch Your Incentives — NASDAQ added two new incentives programs, and robotraders responded. On November 1st, there were 369 seconds where the number of quotes in BAC exceeded 17,000; a total of 6.6 million quotes. During those seconds, only 1,879 trades executed. Between market open (9:30am) and 12:45, BAC had 7.8 million quotes and 116,000 trades. Which means 85% of all BAC quotes occurred in those 369 seconds. Which means it is likely that one algo from one firm (all of this quote spam is from Nasdaq) is responsible for 85% of all canceled orders in BAC. (via Robert O’Brien)
Predicting Web Search Abandonment Rationales (PDF) — Microsoft Research paper on how to predict why people cease to search or to click through on the search results. I’m really impressed by how well they could distinguish “bah, the Internet doesn’t have it, I’m giving up” from “oh, the answer was in a search result snippet, my work here is done.” (via Mark Alen)
