I read the New York Times and Wall Street Journal most days.
Recent articles I recommend:
- By BENEDICT CAREY (NYT 29 Sept)A massive international study of the content of twitter messages during different times of the day/days of the week/weeks of the year shows a consistent human biological rhythm of being happiest around 8am and 11pm and least happy around 5am and 3pm each day.
- Fast Traders, Under Attack, Defend Work (NYT, 18 Jul) on high-frequency trading in the stock market
My unpublished Letter to the Editor:High-frequency trading is to the stock market as junk mail is to the USPS.
Over decades, junk mail quietly grew in volume and influence. Now, in economically lean years, the USPS can’t afford to trim the revenue from the junk mail fat its consumers don't even want.
HFT got a majority foothold in the stock market much faster than junk mail did in the postal service. We need to act pronto--and aggressively--to get rid of parasitic HFT if we want to escape a similar fate to that of the USPS's sickly dependence.
"Real" pieces of mail and trades made by real humans were the original motivators behind the USPS and stock market, respectively. If we let the stock market's regulations and behavior evolve around HFT's growing influence, we'll end up with a dependent platform that can no longer serve its original user: the lowly human.
- Across Europe, Irking Drivers is Urban Policy (NYT, 26 Jun)
Excerpt
In recent years, even former car capitals like Munich have evolved into “walkers’ paradises,” said Lee Schipper, a senior research engineer at Stanford University who specializes in sustainable transportation.
“In the United States, there has been much more of a tendency to adapt cities to accommodate driving,” said Peder Jensen, head of the Energy and Transport Group at the European Environment Agency. “Here there has been more movement to make cities more livable for people, to get cities relatively free of cars.”
