Why do we allow a storm to bring the market down?

Since the rise of electronic trading, the stock and related markets seem to me to be nearly identical to other network services. Amazon.com and Google do not allow a single weather event or earthquake or whatever to disrupt normal operations.

The standard way of doing this is to set up distributed data centers in geographically stable but widely separated places. Why can't we have this for our markets as well?

 I speculate that it may be the illusion that the fading market makers have that their personal involvement is required for the functioning of the markets. One official was quoted "we could have opened the electronic trading markets but didn't want to endanger our employees who have to be present to run it." Clearly if you have one data center in New Jersey, one in Chicago, one in Seattle and one in Hawaii this won't happen.

Yes, you will lose the femtosecond response you're getting from being right next to the New York data center, but so will everyone else. Until power is restored, anyway. (I enjoyed Scott Patterson's book Dark Pools on the rise of electronic trading, which got me thinking about this.)

Comments please!

Tamiflu apparently doesn't work after all ...

Here's a disturbing video on selection bias in the publication of medical results. The economic incentive to publish only positive results has clearly overwhelmed the regulatory and public outrage response up to this point, but clearly we're better off as a society if we cease to fool ourselves about drugs or anything else. Comments?

Favorite Recent Fiction: Charles Stross

I promised a while ago now to add recommended fiction in the wake of the nonfiction list I posted. I couldn't bring myself to mash all my favorites together so I am going to take them author by author.

First up is Charles Stross, who's produced three of my favorite recent titles:

Singularity Sky: This one is a space opera with an unusual blend: a clashing of cultures (libertarian from Earth vs. neo-Soviet style New Republic), a clash of nature vs humans, nature having produced the Eschaton, which has distributed humans across the cosmos and left an obelisk on each world warning humans not to mess with the timeline ... and of course a love story. This one just floored me, even my second time through it. But some people I've recommended it to put it down, probably too soon. If you have trouble with the early sections please do hang with it until Rachel appears and you'll be rewarded.

Iron Sunrise is the sequel to Singularity Sky and enjoyable, but didn't grab me as intensely as the others I mention here.

Halting State: since I'm an (often) contract computer programmer, the prologue captured me. It's a fake email to 'Nigel McDonald' about a job offer for him and purports to be from an AI that knows "you'll never be promoted because your slimy boss is boffing that cute colleague of yours" etc., etc.

After that it tells the story of a very strange crime that occurs inside a computer game. Somebody at the game company calls the local (Edinburgh) cops and Sue, the local 'heterosexually challenged' sergeant responds. Elaine is a fraud investigator for the insurance company, Jack a ... contract computer programmer hired by Elaine's company for technical assistance in getting to the bottom of things.

The story is told in second person from the point of these three characters, and I found it just riveting! It's a mystery/thriller with extra plot elements (a game called Spooks that turns out to be not really just a game, backstories for all three characters that resonate ..) ... I "couldn't put it down" (though I experienced it as an audiobook, described elsewhere in this blog ...)

Rule 34: This is the sequel to Halting State, bringing back Sue and her boss Liz and some other minor characters from that book. Also added is Anwar, a petty criminal and schemer whose schemes go consistently awry, and the Toymaker, a psychopathic employee of a global shadowy corporation who has discovered ... that psychopaths make good operatives. This one is darker, more violent, sick in places ... and I just loved it! Not for the squeamish, though.

I have read one other of Stross's books, Accelerando, which tells me that I should stick with the audiobook format for fiction. I first read this book, since there was no audiobook yet ... and it didn't much grab me. In fact I didn't really remember much of it after a year. But recently the audiobook was released and I tried it and wow! It's still not quite as compelling for me as the three favorites liste above, but I just skim so much in reading and get to / have to sit and pay attention to the audiobook that I got so much more out of in this format!

Once again, audible.com is the place for audiobooks!

Next up: Lois McMaster Bujold (and Miles Vorkosigan!)