Liked on YouTube: How algorithms shape our world – Kevin Slavin

Blackbox trading: algorithmic hide and seek

This was a really enjoyable Tedtalk on algorithms and their use in the financial field, not strictly relevant to teaching per say but something I found really intriguing from this was the idea that the speed of the algorithm’s calculations were affected by the distance of the server they were housed on from the server delivering the world financial data. It is only micro-seconds, but since an algorithm takes microsections to run, that means a financial house in New York gets information quicker than one in Texas and these micro-second delays add up. Due to this, the financial companies are buying buildings nearer the server hubs and rerouting internet service cables and actively affecting the landscape and cityscape.

We’ve spent a lot of time over the last fortnight talking about human behaviour and how it can be affected by the data resulting from algorithms, it turns out that algorithms are affecting our behaviour, even before, the algorithm itself presents us with data to act upon.