Chimp brokers outperform professionals
SADLY, no readers have yet managed to dig up references – other than circular references to Feedback – for the investment strategy that involves a chimpanzee flinging its breakfast at the stock price pages (14 May). You have, however, found a rich seam of other primate pricing exercises.
Hilary Gee, for example, writes: “Alas, I could not find any reference to stock selection by chimpanzee faecal projectiles” – picking up the unappetising post-breakfast activity that we in fact had in mind when we wrote our story. She directs us, though, to a report from MSN Money at which opens: “A chimpanzee in Russia has outperformed 94 per cent of the country’s investment funds…” The chimp in question, Lusha, picked a daily selection of eight cubes representing companies.
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And Ian Gordon directs us to a blog called Automatic Finances, at . It reminds us that journalists at The Wall Street Journal took up the challenge of Burton G. Malkiel’s 1973 book A Random Walk Down Wall Street, that “a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages” could do just as well as experts.
In 1988 the journalists decided to play the part of the dart-throwing monkeys and set themselves up in competition with investment experts picking stocks. After 100 such contests the paper declined to declare a winner. The blog, however, says the professional market analysts did have an edge over the dart throwers in the short term – but only just, and the simulated chimps’ picks performed better for longer.
So now we know. Coming soon, the results of our investigations into the meaning of the “bearish Dark Cloud Cover candlestick pattern” seen by the professional who inspired these musings about random investments.
OUR reports on people using words in ways that are divorced from their original meaning (see for example 22 January and 28 May) made Matthew Fasnacht realise that a similar phenomenon can occur with sounds.
“The sound of a duck quacking,” he says, “has always meant to me there is a duck nearby, with something to say, probably to another duck.”
However, things have changed: “I set this sound as the ringtone on my phone. When visiting my parents-in-law, who have a menagerie that includes a number of such birds, a duck kept quacking and my hand kept reaching into my pocket.”
MEANWHILE, readers continue to supply examples of words that refer to outdated concepts (28 May). Several have noted that once upon a time blueprints consisted of white outlines and text on a deep blue background, and that these have become increasingly uncommon over the past 50 years.
Robert Crease wonders how much longer “clockwise” will be understood by those who know only digital timepieces; or how comprehensible “nom de plume” will be to those who know only keyboards – or claviers.
Lesley Carey points out that in the Melbourne Museum in Australia, as in many other places, visitors are encouraged to leave their bags and coats in the cloakroom, although “most of us no longer wear them”.
Turning to the visual side of things, Marc Bush, Thom Seccull and Jody Willis all wonder how long programs will continue to use a 3.5 inch floppy disc as the icon for “save”. “Surely,” says Jody, “no PC has been purchased with a floppy disc drive for years.” She notes that their capacity of 1.4 megabytes is “about enough for a single small image from one of today’s digital cameras.”
AND, more abstractly, Eddy Barratt points to the rapid evolution of the concept “meme” – from Richard Dawkins’s subtle point about the nature of replicators in culture and elsewhere, to “internet memes” such as the “longcat” graphic and having oneself photographed in odd or dangerous places, aka “planking”.
KEEPING up with changing meanings can cause other problems. When Mike Walker’s farming systems were being audited for compliance with quality assurance protocols, the auditor fixed Mike with a stern gaze and said “Before we begin, I shall need a PowerPoint.”
Mike’s heart sank, as he had prepared everything in Word and Excel. Then he realised with relief that what the auditor actually needed was somewhere to plug in his computer.
Recording equipment accused of procuring
FINALLY, catching up on news of the UK’s ever-expanding phone-hacking scandal, we read, in what looks like a hastily assembled 9 June piece on the website of The Independent newspaper in London, that “Among the other targets were the former Conservative MP David Mellor, who as the former national heritage secretary threatened tighter regulation of the press and who was subsequently disgraced for his affair with an actress obtained with the help of covert recording equipment.”
That would seem to be very special recording equipment. Does it offer the user a menu of actresses, or does it deliver one at random?
