Category Archives: Tech

Sun Microsystems should acquire Yahoo

Posted on July 4, 2001 | Leave a comment

Sun Microsystems should acquire Yahooo! and integrate its web services into StarOffice and Webtop using SOAP or XML-RPC. The resulting desktop/webtop service would eliminate the need for many local applications, would revolutionize the sharabilility of files and information, and would free us to work with our personal(ized) computer from any computer. Eventually, all Webtop services would be publicly SOAP enabled, eliminating the interface maintenance burden and enabling open “skinning” possibilities.

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Posted in Investment, Media, Stocks, Tech

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Contract and Legal Reference Engine

Posted on June 18, 2001 | Leave a comment

An instant and well documented history of legal rulings – based on fact sets, and legal documents for typical related work – could be produced through information management of historical legal documents. The system would format contracts of a firm with fields that identify important entities and information in each contract (For example, the company later referred to as “COMPANY” would have a corresponding database table field). Then the interface would allow a lawyer – or anyone – to enter information for any fields they thought were relevant, and the system would identify the contracts and cases that are most similar, providing appropriate pre-populated contracts and historical rulings when available. This system would vastly improve efficiencies in the legal industry. In addition, it could provide a tool for judges to research other decisions, and ask for public opinion with a forum for discussion threads. Within a law firm, laywers could enter case or client information and select what kinds of results they would like to receive (Contracts, referrences, etc.)

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Posted in Law, Public Policy, Tech, The Future

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Evolving systems of life and electronics

Posted on June 10, 2001 | Leave a comment

We marvel at the power and potential of digital computing, mechanical tools, and computer interfaces, but is it any wonder compared to the analogous systems that have evolved naturally with biological rather than electronic mechanisms? Each of us is an independent system–with our own processor, frame, muscle structures for output, and sensory organs for input. Humans thankfully evolve because each of us is different, and different from the bodies that came before us. Further, our likelihood for passing on characteristics to future generations is related to our viability and the functions of our biological systems. We are biological machines.

But biology as we know it is limited by physical constraints on our senses, memory, and life-spans. It may even be the case that biological imagination and creativity are limited by the inherent constraints of neurological chemistry, however, I don’t imagine this is the case 🙂 I cannot see 3000 miles away without a camera and transmission, and I cannot remember the URL of the 473rd web page I ever viewed without electronic logs.

It seems clear that humans are developing electronic and mechanical tools to move beyond the constraints of our biological selves. We use electronics to extend our senses, empower our expressiveness, assist our memory, automate our processing, and improve our life-span. It seems inevitable that the evolutions of biological and electronic systems will begin to merge in order to take advantage of the best characteristics of each. To reach such a state, the interface between these systems needs to be improved. We are working on it already, and it is a ways off, but simply a matter of time. We are truly fortunate that the basic input and output signals of our biological nervous system are electrical.

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Posted in Brain in a jar, Just for fun, Media, Personal, Science, Tech, The Future

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Cointegration improvements

Posted on June 9, 2001 | Leave a comment

Cointegration typically uses the price information for two related securities, and provides relative value signals. As with traditional technical trading strategies, changes to the fundamentals create a risk of bad relative value signals. With 2-security cointegration, this risk is doubled because changes to the fundamentals of either company can skew the relative value signal. However, this problem can be cut in half by creating baskets (portfolios) of securities and running the cointegration analysis with each security against the basket. This effectively generates signals which are skewed only by changes to the fundamentals of the individual security. Additionally, the required correlation matrix for the permuted set of security combinations can be replaced by a single vector of correlations – greatly improving calculation efficiency and extending the analysis processing potential.

To improve upon normalizing data to % changes, factors typically associated with beta may also provide better signalling data. For example, as the size of a company grows over the course of a few years, its price volitility may fall. Similarly, as market cap grows, the price change correlations may increase relative to larger cap baskets and decrease relative to smaller cap baskets.

By backtesting, optimal trigger strengths and bet sizes can be measured, however, given the correlation coefficients, volitilities, number of positions, and risk preferences, probabalistically optimal bet sizes may provide better results.

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Posted in Bonds, Commodities, Economics, Investment, Science, Stocks, Tech

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Invest in Biotech and Information Sciences

Posted on June 8, 2001 | Leave a comment

If we invest heavily in biotechnology and information services companies (especially genomics, networked centralized computing, neurology, neural network predictive applications, and nerve regeneration) in the next 50 years, many currently living people may have an opportunity to achieve substantially improved and lengthened quality of life and indefinitely extended sentience.

It’s more than a financial return, but it can still be evaluated financially. The return on these investments should be calculated as the return on the securities themselves, plus the return on your other investments over the period of time that your life and investment horizon are extended. It is possible, then, that the net return on biotech and information science investments may be substancially higher than the direct value change for those investment securities.

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Posted in Brain in a jar, Early Stage, Economics, Freakonomics, Investment, Just for fun, Personal, Science, Stocks, Tech, The Future

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