Monthly Archive for July, 2008

GX4000 black market

Published on 11 July 2008 in gaming and retro. 0 Comments

Following the post on ridiculous Amstrad cartridge prices being fetched on Ebay, a bandwagonjumper has tried to cash in by selling off an obviously illegit copy of Street Fighter II for 40 quid. Wouldn’t mind but for some reason it won’t run on the console, just the home computers – think that might be something to do with the type of EPROM chip used to house the game logic. Maybe.

The black market in GX4000 is not new, supposedly beginning in Poland where games that never made an official release to cart eventually found their way onto the platform by unofficial means. But hopefully all this will stir up the availability of a few more (legit) Pang carts in the coming weeks…

GX4000 cart sells for £92!

Published on 10 July 2008 in gaming and retro. 1 Comment

Something’s very wrong when a game almost 20 years old goes for the above on ebay.co.uk – where did all the collectors come from all of a sudden? And why did this renaissance have to coincide with me buying the failed console with a view to playing Pang on it? (Pang also went for a not so ridiculous £70 but still well out of the budget I’m prepared to pay for such retro goodness)

I’ve started a thread over on cpczone’s forum about it, although I’m sure they’ll be as bewildered at the build up in action as I am.

Further on the trend following thing

Published on 9 July 2008 in information media, machine learning and newsflow. 1 Comment

Yesterday I blogged about the use of online news aggregators such as Google News to map trends. Further surfing on the topic yielded the current state of the art in such aggregators – Silobreaker is at it’s most basic another news aggregator. But it’s added value lies in it’s ability to analyse, group & visualise related news stories in a way much more intelligent than the likes of Google’s related story results.

For an example of how this fits in with my idea of a trend alerting system, see one of it’s bespoke topics – profit warnings. Historic data seems to back anything up to a year, and what Silobreaker calls a ’360 degree’ view, you get quotes, blogs, media trends as well as the news. The trends graph can be used to compare the relative media interest in news subjects, or ‘entities’ – a welcome nod in the direction of the Semantic Web there, with users having the ability to add entities not already recognised.

Further on the Semantic theme there is a network function that produces graphs of related entities. The obligatory news to map function is also available, and extremely useful it is too – I just learned of the US airstrikes against Al Qaeda on Somali soil because of it. As with the trend function, a time range can be specified.

There are always room for improvements on machine learning, and Silobreaker is no different – the above US airstrike news item was listed as of Baghdad origin, which in itself seemed fine as source of the article was a UPI journalist in Baghdad, but there was no mention of the Somali bombing run over Somalia itself on the world map.

Registering gives you the ability to personalise among other things your list of news sources. I guess what I’m saying from all this is that Silobreaker does much of the heavy lifting I’d envisage a financial trend forecasting tool to do. What now is needed is an API to access this analysis – something I’d be hopeful for, considering their background in ‘open source’ intelligence.

Machine Readable Google News

Published on 8 July 2008 in computer science, Google, machine learning and newsflow. 0 Comments

Wired yesterday reports on a health site service that tracks disease outbreaks using news feeds such as Google news. A nifty bayesian-based machine learning algorithm is used, filtering out noise with some kind of intelligent phrase indexing -

For instance, key words like “mysterious” tend to pop up in outbreak stories, but not, say, in coverage of vaccine programs. Another common feature of outbreak stories is a small number in the headline, usually to denote a number of people infected or killed.

The site has actually been up & running since 2006 as this gmaps mashup blog records.

More detail on how it works can be found here.

I would like to create something along these lines for financial data, with buy/sell signals replacing the gmaps visualisation. Google News, owing to it’s concentration on news aggregation, does not currently capture stories quick enough for it to be used as part of a beat-the-market type event trading system. It’s aggregation nature would however lend itself perfectly to a more long term trend alerting mechanism. The smarts to be built on top of it would I imagine be pretty similar to what goes on in HealthMap above.

Industry talk on news flow algorithms seems to have disappeared after a bit of buzz a few years back. It may have went the way of the Neural Networks of the 80s.

Uber Geek Chic Post #1

Published on 5 July 2008 in cool and open source. 0 Comments

Far be it from me to join the salivating hordes, but the sporadically named Openmoko Neo FreeRunner was released yesterday and I am interested. Although the Freerunner itself is basically just a marketable update on their original neo1973 model, the general idea of an open-hardware phone is something that appeals to me, in a way Google Android and the rest haven’t yet quite managed. And I’ve tried to get into the mobile platform thing. But reading Facebook on the move really doesn’t do it for me. Perhaps something like this will.