- Tangle — open source Javascript library for creating slider-type widgets in web pages, with built-in updating of other web elements. This is fantastic for exploring “what-if” scenarios. Check out the demos.
- Location-Based Security — The researchers have created a customized version of Android controlled by a “policy engine” on a server. The Android devices use Bluetooth and near-field communications infrastructure to determine the location of the user, and what level of access they have to what kind of information, as well as the level of functionality of their device. Security, however, is defined not by what you can do but by what the bad guys can’t do, and this seems very dependent upon external triggers (wifi and bluetooth) which are readily faked.
- Google Puts a Price on Privacy — I’d never realized before that https and referer information are only loosely compatible: Google has to go to efforts to restore referer information because browsers don’t pass the referer tag on when going from https (e.g., google.com) to http (e.g., your web site).
- Rocketcharts — open source Javascript financial charting library.
"finance" entries
Four short links: 24 October 2011
Interactive Web Goodness, Location Based Security, Referer vs https, and Financial Charting
Top Stories: August 29-September 2, 2011
Open data products with purpose, why finance should care about big data, and the untapped value of site search.
This week on O'Reilly: Tom Steinberg from mySociety offered practical advice for building useful and long lasting open data products, we examined the intersection of big data and finance, and we learned why neglected site search engines deserve way more attention.
Why the finance world should care about big data and data science
Roger Magoulas on data's potential to improve finance systems and create new businesses.
O'Reilly director of market research Roger Magoulas discusses the intersection of big data and finance, and the opportunities this pairing creates for financial experts.
Four short links: 3 June 2011
Distributed Drug Money, Science Game, Beautiful Machine Learning, and Stream Event Processing
- Silk Road (Gawker) — Tor-delivered “web” site that is like an eBay for drugs, currency is Bitcoins. Jeff Garzik, a member of the Bitcoin core development team, says in an email that bitcoin is not as anonymous as the denizens of Silk Road would like to believe. He explains that because all Bitcoin transactions are recorded in a public log, though the identities of all the parties are anonymous, law enforcement could use sophisticated network analysis techniques to parse the transaction flow and track down individual Bitcoin users. “Attempting major illicit transactions with bitcoin, given existing statistical analysis techniques deployed in the field by law enforcement, is pretty damned dumb,” he says. The site is viewable here, and here’s a discussion of delivering hidden web sites with Tor. (via Nelson Minar)
- Dr Waller — a big game using DC Comics characters where players end up crowdsourcing science on GalaxyZoo. A nice variant on the captcha/ESP-style game that Luis von Ahn is known for. (via BoingBoing)
- Machine Learning Demos — hypnotically beautiful. Code for download.
- Esper — stream event processing engine, GPLv2-licensed Java. (via Stream Event Processing with Esper and Edd Dumbill)
Strata Week: Will data make stock exchanges unnecessary?
Data could disrupt the stock world, how stolen data is sold, and geography data's predictive power
Will big data kill the stock exchange? That question was recently explored by Andy Kessler. Plus: How recent security breaches could shape the black market and a look at how "island biogeography" predicted Osama Bin Laden's location.
Trading on sentiment
Sentiment analysis gives algorithmic trading an edge
Sorting through thousands of news stories and categorizing information based on mood and tone creates useful data points for financial systems.
Quantum trading! And tunnels through the Earth!
Remember when we used to place data centers in whatever cheap abandoned warehouse was nearby? That's a quaint notion in an era where trading advantage and arbitrage depend more and more on the speed of light and link distance.
The ecology of risk
Financial stability can benefit from approaches grounded in the natural sciences.
Large-scale events that have disrupted supply chains underscore the importance of viewing the world through a spatial lens.
Strata Week: Statistically speaking
Trading platforms, truth in graphs, European financial stats, and Mandelbrot's passing.
In this edition of Strata Week: The London Stock Exchange moves from .Net to open source; learn how graphical scales can lie; the Euroean Central Bank president calls for better financial statistics; and we bid farewell to the father of fractals.
Four short links: 20 September 2010
Robot Trades, Quirky Adventures, Tabular Data Library, and It's Hard to be Evil
- The Tracks of Bizarre Robot Traders (The Atlantic) — I love the idea that these mysterious effect-less trades might simply be there to slow down competitors’ analytic systems because every millisecond matters.
- MS Paint Adventures — a weird mashup of MS Paint and text adventure games.
- tablib — a format-agnostic tabular dataset library for Python. (via joshua on delicious)
- Password Reuse (XKCD) — so very true.