Sun-Sentinel, UAL story resurface thanks to Google
Follow up on UAL stock falls after Sun-Sentinel posts old story.
WSJ: SEC Opens Early Inquiry Into UAL Glitch — The preliminary inquiry comes as the agency has stepped up its efforts to combat the spreading of false rumors.
Wired: Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Googlebots — From a Tribune statement: “We asked Google to stop using Googlebot and use site maps instead. We’re happy to have Google acquire information from our sites, we just asked them to do it more accurately because we were aware of problems with Googlebot.”
One issue to this story that is not reported as much are the automated trades triggered by algorithms that read press releases and news stories. See WSJ: UAL Story Blame Is Placed on Computer.
The damage was exacerbated by the growing use on Wall Street of automated programs that trigger stock trades without any human interaction. The so-called algorithmic trading mechanisms, which buy and sell stocks based on news headlines and earnings data, were responsible for roughly a quarter of New York Stock Exchange trades in the last week of August.
NY Times: A Stock-Killer Fueled by Algorithm After Algorithm
As for preventing another similar incident, leaving sharper date cues for Google would seem to be far easier than changing the habits of millions of readers. In this case, though, it only took one reader to open the barn door for United stock’s shockingly swift decline — the one working at Income Securities Advisers, who saw the item on Google News and sent out a summary of it on Bloomberg News.
So algorithm’s miss one every so often. The probably make too many millions of dollars to stop using them.
Honda teases with Insight hybrid
A Honda hybrid that costs $3,000 less than a Toyota Prius? Yes I’m interested.
Greenbizjournal:Honda gives hybrid sneak peak
Earth2Tech: Honda’s Hybrid: The Insight’s Coming in 2009
Frequency of last names
I have a surname that is English, so I was surprised that the highest concentration of my surname is on the coast of Sweden, followed by the U.S. Try your surname at the World Name Profiler site. Hamrick Software has a similar surname tracker, which tracks your surnames through the U.S. at points of time. Not much distribution on the surname before 1920 and in just a few states.
In the US, the Eubanks surname ranks 1,673 in most common and there were 19,616 in the 2000 Census, according to David L. Word, Charles D. Coleman, Robert Nunziata and Robert Kominski (2008) and featured on Mongabay. “Demographic Aspects of Surnames from Census 2000”. U.S. Census Bureau. Family lore says the name was Eubank originally, which ranks 5,986 in most common with 5,298 occurrences in the 2000 U.S. Census.
UAL stock falls after Sun-Sentinel posts old story
Today was not a good day for the Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale and UAL, the parent company of United Airlines.
Someone at Sun-Sentinel posts a 6-year-old story Sunday by the Chicago Tribune about UAL bankruptcy as a current story. Income Securities Advisors Inc., a Florida-based investory information service, distributed the report on Bloomberg terminals on Monday, after having first saw the story on Google Monday morning. According to Forbes, in 10 minutes 24 million shares changed hands and the stock fell to $3. Before NASDAQ halts trading, UAL stock has fallen from $12.16 a share to 1 cent a share. When stock reopens, about two hours later, stock recovers to $11.22, down only 8.77%.
As Sun-Sentinel sorts through what happened, one point is that the date of the article was not shown. One unanswered question is whether NASDAQ will allow the trades, but when similar things have happened in the past they did not block the trades.
Editor & Publisher: United Stock Nearly Wiped Out on Old ‘Chicago Tribune’ Story
Forbes: Inside The UAL Story Debacle
Bloomberg Television: United Parent UAL Says It Didn’t File for Bankruptcy
Drout’s lecture make English and literature interesting
I love audiobooks. They’re great for the daily commute, the daily walk or even doing certain choirs. I’ve listened to books I’d never bother to read. Thanks to The Public Library of Charlotte Mecklenburg County, I can access audiobooks through netlibrary.
Lately I’ve enjoyed listening to lectures by Michael D.C. Drout, recorded for Modern Scholars: A History of the English Language, A Way with Words: Rhetoric, Writing and the Arts of Persuasion, and From Here to Infinity: An Exploration of Science Fiction Literature. They are informative and entertaining and leaves me wanting to learn more. Drout also has a blog — Wormtalk and Slugspeak.
Contraction in the newspaper industry is painful to watch
Watching the ad revenue fall is not pleasant. There also seems to be no sigh of a floor yet either.
From TechCrunch: The newspaper industry took in $1.7 billion less in print ads during the second quarter than the year before For the first half of the year, the industry is down $3.1 billion.
From Reflections of a Newsosaur: Based on the results in the first half of the year, it appears that total newspaper revenues will be less than $40 billion in 2008, the lowest in a dozen years.
The chart below is from same article by Newsosaur:
Trying Google Chrome — too early at this time
Couldn’t wait to try Google Chrome. One feature I like is the pages I frequently visiting being shown on a new page. I think a feature like could end up chaning web behavior. It’s not longer one homepage that opens. Chrome is still rough, but it might push broswer development.
WSJ’s Walt Mossberg says Chrome could challenge Internet Explorer, but that would first require Chrome to be approved by corporate IT desks. Some of the folks can be conservative. After all these years some corporate IT departments still require IE6.
I wonder if Firefox isn’t more threatened by Chrome than IE.
Wealth distribution in 2004
WSJ: The ranks of the ultrawealthy grow. From 2004 tax reports, the number of individuals with net worth of more than $2 million is is less than 1.5 million individuals. For the top range of $20 million or more, only 47,000 peole were at that level.
California had the largest number of residents with a net worth of $1.5 million or more, with 428,000 in 2004. Florida came in second, with 199,000, followed by New York (168,000), Texas (108,000), Illinois (101,000), Pennsylvania (86,000) and Massachusetts (83,000).
Good read: Charlie Wilson’s War
Finished the audiobook version of “Charlie Wilson’s War” by George Crile. A fascinating book about the inner-workings of the CIA, Congress, U.S. foreign policy, and an unusual character – Charlie Wilson.
An interesting premise of the book is that by helping the mujahideen defeat the Soviet Union when it invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. may have unexpectantly led to the attacks againt the U.S., including the Trade Center bombing and the 9/11 attacks. The book doesn’t twell on that too much, most of it is just an interesting look behind the scenes of people using power.