Bike snobs and genius bears, oh my!

A couple of musings, based on articles I read today.

First, when do you think that Stephen Colbert is going to take notice of Yellow-Yellow the "genius bear" and declare her to be a threat to national security?:

"She's quite talented," said Jamie Hogan, owner of BearVault, based in San Diego. "I'm an engineer, and if one genius bear can do it, sooner or later there might be two genius bears. We're trying to work on a new design that we can hopefully test on her."

I'll bet Yellow-Yellow will be breaking into nuclear storage depots next.

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Next, I read this article today and it piqued my interest with one question that has been bugging me for, like, forever: why do professional/fashionable cyclists position their sunglasses OVER their helmet straps? It makes no sense to me. I can think of several times in my life when I've been traveling down the road at 20+mph, ran into a bee/wasp, and "successfully" ripped my helmet off to let my angry tenant escape. So, my question is this: is it fashionable to rip off your helmet and destroy your sunglasses, all to save a bumblebee? Terminally un-cool cyclists like myself want to know know the answers to important questions like these.

Electronic Trading Marketplace Is In Need of a Fairness Algorithm

I found this article to be fascinating:

The slower traders began issuing buy orders. But rather than being shown to all potential sellers at the same time, some of those orders were most likely routed to a collection of high-frequency traders for just 30 milliseconds — 0.03 seconds — in what are known as flash orders. While markets are supposed to ensure transparency by showing orders to everyone simultaneously, a loophole in regulations allows marketplaces like Nasdaq to show traders some orders ahead of everyone else in exchange for a fee.

I guess I find this article to be interesting for three reasons. First, I predicted that this would start to occur nearly a decade ago (which begs the question: why am I still working at $DAYJOB? Ugh.) Second, I find this to be academically interesting, because whenever I see a large-scale system with this many transactions, I wonder to myself how well the system is designed and tested (in my day-to-day work, I continue to see....interesting...methods of ensuring synchronization and transaction-consistency). And third, I think that the people who run these electronic markets really need to put some thought into implementing some fairness algorithms....otherwise I can't see how this situation won't devolve into investment firms turning themselves into high-speed loops that run algorithms that MAKE MONEY FAST....much to the detriment to the actual electronic marketplace.

The Problem with Groups on LinkedIn

Like a lot of other people, I have signed up with LinkedIn in order to manage my professional contacts. Overall, I think that LinkedIn is a good service (as long as one carefully manages one's privacy, that is...). Overall, I would say that the vast majority of all of the email that I have received that came about as a result of my LinkedIn account has been worthwhile for me to read.

However, with the introduction of a new feature, LinkedIn has put my overall goodwill towards this service in a precarious place. This new feature is the LinkedIn "Groups" feature.

At first, LinkedIn Groups seemed like a good idea: give people who are part of the same logical group the ability to network. So, for example, alumni from a certain university can join a LinkedIn Group. Most of the people who are part of this "group" have never interacted professionally, but because they're part of a group now they can more easily connect. Okay so far....

The problem is that, as the size of the group grows, the probability that the group will grow to include people you never want to hear from also grows. Guess what? This is already starting to happen in LinkedIn Groups.

So, for example, if you join a LinkedIn Group devoted to the the university that you happened to graduate from, at some point in the future some loser/spammer can also join that group. At this point, because you are part of the same LinkedIn Group, this loser/spammer can send email to the ENTIRE group. There is apparently very little in LinkedIn to guard against this sort of abuse.

Before the introduction of the LinkedIn Groups feature, this sort of behavior wasn't really possible. I mean, you could get spammed by some co-worker who you knew at some previous job, but at this point you could just disconnect from this in-duh-vidual and be done with the problem. This isn't really possible with LinkedIn Groups -- either you're all in or your not.

I predict that LinkedIn is going to have to deal with a LOT of this sort of abuse in the future. I do hope that LinkedIn introduces some sort of moderation system, controlled by the users themselves. It'd be nice to hear that some loser got his LinkedIn account yanked because some threshhold of regular users deemed his/her mail to be spam.

In the meanwhile, the one thing that I've done to fix this problem for myself is to configure my LinkedIn preferences to send me "Group" updates no more often than once a week. This makes the spammers much easier to deal with.