DIKW pyramid

“Quote Stuffing” and the Collective Intellect

~ This post is a continuation of Decay of Knowledge, Rise of Tech Debt ~ Unless you are among the short list of folks with detailed understanding at the crossroads of financial market microstructure and highly-automated trading, the term quote stuffing might not ring a bell. But, since the concept behind this loaded term is germane to the points I want to make here, it is worth taking a moment to wrap your head around the basics. The parallels between the kinds of shenanigans that go on inside financial market microstructure and the emerging study of the "attention economy" or an "attention market" are fascinating. First discovered by Nanex in 2010 (shortly after the Flash Crash), quote stuffing is an automated trading technique that is used to flood trading infrastructure - namely, "matching engines" and the surrounding connectivity - with quotes that are then quickly cancelled. The goal of this strategy is to spike data flows to a point that surpasses the bandwidth capacity of the target trading infrastructure. This [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:18:45-04:00March 13th, 2018|Open|

Decay of Knowledge, Rise of Tech Debt

Has (information) technology made us smarter? And, are there costs that counteract - if not, neutralize - the perceived benefits of technology? Given the intangible and elusive nature of the impacts, plausible answers to increasingly common questions like these usually defy placement into an analytical framework. This post is our attempt to begin to overcome such impediments and be as objective as possible about the full range of impacts from technology, whether the use case be personal or institutional. The Digital Attention Crisis Our hypothesis on the decay of knowledge and the rise of "tech debts" is based on the idea that knowledge decay in the digital era is influenced by the following chain of logic: The capacity of (human) attention is, at best, inelastic - both individually and collectively; The proliferation of technology into all aspects of our lives represents an increasing source of distraction, noise, and "overhead" - collectively known herein as technology debts; The payment of tech debts is likely to increase in tandem with the increasing [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:18:35-04:00January 22nd, 2018|Open|