Gordian Knots

Gmail Tools: “GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google GMail account, allowing you to use GMail as a storage medium.

GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google GMail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your GMail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag’n'drop files to.

Ever since Google started to offer users a GMail e-mail account, which includes storage space of a 1000 megabytes, you have had plenty of storage space but not a lot to fill it up with. With GMail Drive you can easily copy files to your GMail account and retrieve them again.

When you create a new file using GMail Drive, it generates an e-mail and posts it to your account. The e-mail appears in your normal Inbox folder, and the file is attached as an e-mail attachment. GMail Drive periodically checks your mail account (using the GMail search function) to see if new files have arrived and to rebuild the directory structures. But basically GMail Drive acts as any other hard-drive installed on your computer.

You can copy files to and from the GMail Drive folder simply by using drag’n'drop like you’re used to with the normal Explorer folders.

Download: GMail Drive 1.04 (119 KB)”

Mark Cuban’s advice

2. If you can sell, you can get a job – anywhere, anytime

I don’t remember who told me that selling was a job for a lifetime, but they were right.

If you can sell, you can find a job….. I will take a high school dropout who is caring, involved and can sell over an MBA ……almost everytime.

What makes a good salesperson?

Let me be clear that it’s not the person who can talk someone into anything. It’s not the hustler who is a smooth talker. The best salespeople are the ones who put themselves in their customer’s shoes and provide a solution that makes the customer happy.

The best salesperson is the one the customer trusts and never has to question.

The best salesperson is the one who knows that with every cold call made, they are closer to helping someone.

The best salesperson is the one who takes immense satisfaction from the satisfaction their customer gets.

The best salesperson is the one who wakes up early every morning excited to come to the office and get on the phone and let people know exactly why they love their product, their job and their clients

Sound corny? It is. It’s also very simple.

It’s also the most important job in every company. There has yet to be a successful company that has survived with zero sales.

So if selling is the most important job in a company, why do fewer and fewer people seem to be wanting the job?

Why aren’t their many colleges offering majors in “Salesmanship�, not Sales and Marketing. Just pure, old fashioned selling?

If you don’t have a job, or don’t have the job you want, get a job in sales. Every single person on this planet can learn to be a great salesperson. All you have to do is put in the effort and care about your company, your prospects and customers.

Once you excel at selling, getting a job is easy. But then again, if you are good, I’m sure the company you work for is going to do everything they can to keep you.

New Scientist Breaking News – ‘Zero intelligence’ trading closely mimics stock market: “A model that assumes stock market traders have zero intelligence has been found to mimic the behaviour of the London Stock Exchange very closely.

However, the surprising result does not mean traders are actually just buying and selling at random, say researchers. Instead, it suggests that the movement of markets depend less on the strategic behaviour of traders and more on the structure and constraints of the trading system itself.

The research, led by J Doyne Farmer and his colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico, US, say the finding could be used to identify ways to lower volatility in the stock markets and reduce transaction costs, both of which would benefit small investors and perhaps bigger investors too.

A spokesperson for the London Stock Exchange says: ‘It’s an interesting bit of work that mirrors things we’re looking at ourselves.’

Most models of financial markets start with the assumption that traders act rationally and have access to all the information they need. The models are then tweaked to take into account that these assumptions are not always entirely true.

But Farmer and his colleagues took a different approach. ‘We begin with random agents,’ he says. ‘The model was idealised, but nonetheless we still thought it might match some of the properties of real markets.’

Buying and selling

In the model, agents with zero intelligence place random orders to buy and sell stocks at a given price. If an order to sell is lower than the highest buy price in the system, the transaction will take place and the order will be removed – a market order. If the sell order is higher than the highest buy price, it will stay in the system until a matching buy order is found – a limit order. For example, if the highest order to buy a stock is $10, limit orders to sell will be above $10 and market orders to sell will be below $10.

The team used the model to examine two important characteristics of financial markets. These were the spread – the price difference between the best buy and sell limit orders – and the price diffusion rate – a standard measure of risk that looks at how quickly the price changes and by how much.

The model was tested against London Stock Exchange data on 11 real stocks collected over 21 months – 6 million buy and sell orders. It predicted 96% of the spread variance and 76% of the variance in the price diffusion rate. The model also showed that increasing the number of market orders increased price volatility because there are then fewer limit orders to match up with each other.

Incentives and charges

The observation could be useful in the real financial markets. “If it is considered socially desirable to lower volatility, this can be done by giving incentives for people who place limit orders, and charging the people who place market orders,” Farmer says.

Some amount of volatility is important, because prices should reflect any new information, but many observers believe there is more volatility than there should be. “On one day the prices of US stock dropped 20% on no apparent news,” says Farmer. “High volatility makes people jittery and sours the investment climate.” It also creates a high spread, which can make it more expensive to trade in shares.

The London Stock Exchange already has a charging structure in place that encourages limit orders. “Limit orders are a good way for smaller investors to trade on the order book,” says a spokesperson.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0409157102)

Alaska Village Moves from Diesel to ‘Micro-Nuke’: “The small town of Galena, Alaska, is tired to pay 28 cents/kwh for its electricity, three times the national average. Today, Galena ‘is powered by generators burning diesel that is barged in during the Yukon River’s ice-free months,’ according to Reuters. But Toshiba, which designs a small nuclear reactor named 4S (for ‘Super Safe, Small, & Simple’), is offering a free reactor to the 700-person village, reports the New York Times (no reg. needed). Galena will only pay for operating costs, driving down the price of electricity to less than 10 cents/kwh. The 4S is a sodium-cooled fast spectrum reactor — a low-pressure, self-cooling reactor. It will generate power for 30 years before refueling and should be installed before 2010 providing an approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

First, where is Galena? Galena is a 700-person Athabascan Indian village on the Yukon River, located 275 miles west of Fairbanks and 550 miles northwest of Anchorage.

Here is the status of the deal as told by Reuters.

Galena officials met with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. If the commission approves the plan, the reactor would be the first new one permitted in the United States since the early 1980s, according to an Alaska Public Radio Network report on Thursday.

Energy to power electricity is important to Galena. Winter temperatures can dip below minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 51 Celsius). Daylight is scarce because of the short days during the winter.

Galena is powered by generators burning diesel that is barged in during the Yukon River’s ice-free months. That is costly and carries its own environmental risks because diesel can spill.

Toshiba, which designs a new 10-megawatt nuclear reactor, offered to install one of these in the hope that other isolated towns will follow, explains the New York Times.

New Robot Arm Installed on Space Station: “NASA has announced that a 5 hour 28 minute space walk by two ISS astronauts has been completed and the International Space Station now has a new, external robot arm. The double-jointed manipulator arm is known as ROKVISS (Robotics Component Verification on ISS) and is part of a German commercial experiment. The device can operate in both an autonomous mode and in a telepresence mode. The primary purpose of the arm is to test the long-term reliability of new, lightweight robotics components in space. A Sci-Tech article has more info on the new arm and also mentions that the astronauts discoverd a mysterious, white, honeycomb-like substance growing on the outside of the space station during their spacewalk (yikes!).

Ian’s Shoelace Site – Shoe Lacing Methods:

“How many possible ways are there to lace an average shoe? This simple question, when answered with mathematics, results in some surprisingly big numbers – on an average shoe with six pairs of eyelets, there are 1,961,990,553,600 ways to feed a shoelace though those 12 eyelets. That’s almost 2 trillion possibilities!

However, many of these can’t be considered ‘Lacing Methods’ because they don’t even fulfil the primary purpose of holding the shoe closed, whilst many are hopelessly tangled messes, and many are minor, irrelevant variations. Nonetheless, even with real-world constraints there are countless possible lacing methods.”

Some of the most computationally-intensive tasks around are real-time valuations of derivative securities. Wall Street traders need these for executing the trade whenever anyone wants to hedge stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, credit, mortgages, power … the list goes on. Emanuel Derman’s My Life as a Quant is the engaging odyssey of a theoretical physicist turned serious programmer (by way of Bell Labs), turned “rocket scientist” or “quant” (Wall Street slang for the folks who’ve taken computer-aided design and valuation of financial products to new levels these last two decades).

I bought a new Apple iBook. This is my first blog post from my iBook. I run Mac OS X 10.3 in it with a predominantly X11 front-end and open source software; Firefox, Thunderbird, GnuCash, Gimp…..

The BSD Unix backbone of Mac OS X is extremely stable, robust and dependable. It also allows a skilled enthusiast to tweak the universe to suit this needs.