| New Technologies Redraw the World’s Energy Picture Posted: 25 Oct 2011 11:36 PM PDT Good NYT piece on our ongoing energy shift. A little optimistic for my skeptical taste, but these are important changes: This striking shift in energy started in the 1990s with the first deepwater wells in the Gulf of Mexico and Brazil, but it has taken off in the last decade as a result of declining conventional fields, climbing energy prices and swift technological change. The United States may now have the means to reduce its half century of dependence on the Middle East. China and India may have the means to fuel the development of their growing middle classes. Japan and much of Europe may have the chance to reduce dependence on nuclear power. And, at least theoretically, poor African countries might be able to lift themselves out of poverty. For consumers around the world, the new fuels should moderate future price increases. But giving new life to fossil fuels is a devil's bargain, probably making solutions to climate change, and the development of renewable energy, even more difficult. "Not only are you extending the fossil fuels era," said Daniel Lashof, director of the climate program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, "but you are moving into fossil fuels that are dirtier and release more carbon pollution in the process of extracting and using them."
via New Technologies Redraw the World's Energy Picture – NYTimes.com. 
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| racking Traders’ Understanding of the Market Posted: 25 Oct 2011 05:16 PM PDT New paper. Initially looked interesting, but on further reading I’m less convinced. Anyway: Tracking Traders’ Understanding of the Market Using e-Communication Data Abstract Tracking the volume of keywords in Internet searches, message boards, or Tweets has provided an alternative for following or predicting associations between popular interest or disease incidences. Here, we extend that research by examining the role of e-communications among day traders and their collective understanding of the market. Our study introduces a general method that focuses on bundles of words that behave differently from daily communication routines, and uses original data covering the content of instant messages among all day traders at a trading firm over a 40-month period. Analyses show that two word bundles convey traders’ understanding of same day market events and potential next day market events. We find that when market volatility is high, traders’ communications are dominated by same day events, and when volatility is low, communications are dominated by next day events. We show that the stronger the traders’ attention to either same day or next day events, the higher their collective trading performance. We conclude that e-communication among traders is a product of mass collaboration over diverse viewpoints that embodies unique information about their weak or strong understanding of the market.
via PLoS ONE: Tracking Traders’ Understanding of the Market Using e-Communication Data. 
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| Twitter Digest: 2011-10-25 Posted: 25 Oct 2011 12:00 PM PDT |
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