Author Archive

With programmed trading exploiting every advance in computing, are we headed for an environment where trades happen so fast that they cannot be stopped, even when something goes wrong, for fear the problems would only get worse?  People make emotional judgments when trading, and may overreact to surges in activity that trend downward - but [...]

The MIT Media Lab builds things quickly, and makes them just functional enough so that they can be used for experimentation. “Build first, ask questions later” is not the typical, well-thought out design for conducting research, but it’s an effective method when fast iteration is key to the process. In fact, this approach is similar [...]

The Media Lab is at the forefront of hybrid methods in research, but what we see is a bit strange since it appears on the surface to be similar to product development. The researchers prefer to build first, and ask questions later.  This is deceptive, since it may produce artifacts that appear to be useful. The [...]