JP Morgan

Recently, JP Morgan reported rather biggish losses due to only a few trades/positions. According to rumors, hedgefunds and speculators already took a piece of the cake, since positions are not closed yet. It's not completely known which these are, but apparently they involve the the IG9, a credit default swap index including 125 american companies. You can find more information on it at markit CDX and their product description page. Basically, it's one of the largest and most liquid CDS products. You would want to buy these products to hedge risk on bonds issued by the companies included in the index. Conversely you sell it, if you want to bet on the solvency of the companies. In this case, you get some money up front for selling it and a continuous payments during the contract period (10 years). As soon as a company fails to meet its liabilities, the total loss on the company is calculated, e.g. if the company recovers at 30% after filing for bancrupcy, the 70% loss is mutliplied by the weight of the company in the index (all have 0.8%) gives the amount of money you need to pay to cover for the losses.
Moreover, these products create a leverage and thus opens the possiblity to hedge delta trades by buying on the index. Apparently, this kind of trade caused the problems at JP Morgan. As far as I know, there is no easy access to these products using your everyday discount broker.

List of links to news regarding JP Morgans trade:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303879604577412613778263918.html

Writing systems and non-linearity

Some time ago I posted some links, one of them pointing to a non-linear, graph like writing system called Ouwi; meanwhile I spent some time reading up on the topic of writing systems and have some more pointers:

Pinuyo is a pictorial language which indicates grammatical function of the ideograms by placement and surrounding symbols.

I also found a long, but sometimes deviating thread on 2-dimensional writing systems on the conlang mailing list archive. Unfortunatelly many of the links are now dead, the thread is from 2005.

Omniglot is a nice website about alphabets, writing systems and languages. It contains some constructed systems, like block script, a sylabic alphabet for the english language which combines letters to blocks (like the korean script for example). Most of them are linear ones.

I'm still wondering if there are some languages/alphabets optimized for reading speed. Most are either evolved, natural languages, which certainly are a compromise between reading and writing and the constructed ones optimized for speed like the morse code or shorthand.

In an edit, let me just add a few more links, somewhat related:

Láadan, a feminist language designed for countering male-centering of natural languages.
The gripping language, not spoken but transmitted by touching of the hands.

(dual) n back

I just learnt about the concept of n back tests. Basically, you are presented tokens from a sequence and your task is to determine whether the current token matches the token N steps back.
This can of course be done in parallel with multiple sequences, called "dual", "triple" (..) N-Back, although I haven't seen any implementation of a triple (k, m, n)-Back with different periods in each sequence.

There is a paper which claims to establish a connection between playing dual n back and fluid intelligence. There is also a wired article summarizing the paper.

Check out the flash game presenting a visual and an audio sequence.

Speed math game

http://www.jimmyr.com/blog/speed_math.swf

Are you a genius, too? There are some videos on youtube teaching how to apply the speed arithmetic method the author uses, but you don't need to use in order to get all stars in that game.