Ahora sabemos la causa del lio

Esto es de Wall Street Journal

The pressure on financial engineers, in contrast, has been to compete to get new products out the door quickly, with their firms showing little patience for multiyear research and development. It's too bad these new products could not be labeled "beta," as technologists do when they need to warn that products are not fully tested and still need work.

La presion sobre los ingenieros en finanzas, en contraste, ha sido competir para tener nuevos productos listos rapidamente, con las firmas con poca paciencia para investigacion y desarrollo multianual. Es una lastima que los nuevos productos no pudieran ser denominados beta, tal cual los tecnologos lo hacen cuando necesitan avisar que sus productos no estan totalmente probados y aun necesitan trabajo 

PS es largo para leer en ingles, pero, bueno

Time to Reinvent the Web (and Save Wall Street)

A tech antidote to our current pessimism.

By L. GORDON CROVITZ

The essence of capitalism, Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter warned, is "creative destruction" that undermines economic structures, then replaces them with better ones. Today we know all about destruction. We could use a happy dose of the creative element.

Welcome to TED. Founded 25 years ago, the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design conference is the place for glimpses into the future. The early version of a Mac personal computer was unveiled at TED, now attended by more than 1,000 Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, scientists, artists and Hollywood celebrities. Last week's conference was an antidote to recessionary pessimism. It was also a reminder that other industries, especially Wall Street, need to embrace the technologist ethos of constant creativity and innovation.

The inventor of the World Wide Web could be forgiven for resting on his laurels, but instead Tim Berners-Lee told the audience that it's already time to reimagine the Web. As a young computer scientist in 1989, he sent his manager a memo outlining the idea of hypertext and how it could help researchers share information. His manager scribbled "vague but exciting" and gave him the time to develop the idea.

Mr. Berners-Lee now advocates what he calls "linked data," to go beyond today's hypertext and make readily accessible digital information stored in any format from any source. There's a huge amount of data now in various digital formats, but it's hard to find new relationships or correlations. He said the Web could be reorganized so that well-tagged tables of structured information can easily be linked to others. For example, scientists could link data about proteins and genomics to tackle Alzheimer's. Mr. Berners-Lee led the TED crowd in a chant of "Raw data, now!"

Asked about the benefits of what's called the semantic Web, compared with today's less sophisticated Web, Mr. Berners-Lee told me "It's . . . as hard to explain as my original idea for the Web." The raw-data revolution would be "a paradigm shift as important as the Web was at its time. . . . imagine if you could access all the data from previously unconnected sources and ask any question of the data that you like." People in different disciplines could access the same information from different vantage points. "We'd quickly find new relationships among data and new answers to problems in ways we haven't been able to imagine."

For a few days at TED, this kind of rethinking makes the credit bubble look like a pebble along the path of progress. Futurist Ray Kurzweil reminded the group that exponential growth in the power of computers is just the latest example of more than a century of exponential growth in communication and information technologies, beginning with electromechanical power and continuing through vacuum tubes and transistors. This growth has occurred "through all economies, including the Depression." He announced that Google and NASA agreed to fund his new Singularity University, named for his prediction that computers will soon match humans in key areas of intelligence.

Maybe computers are already smarter than people. The financial engineers whose models failed to capture key risks could take a page from Silicon Valley engineers, who understand that innovation requires sound data applied through trial and error.

Several presenters at TED described creative efforts to perfect robots, which now disarm explosives in Iraq and help surgeons reduce the invasiveness of operations. A researcher displayed a lifelike bust of Albert Einstein, eerily capable of dozens of facial expressions. For several years, Boston Dynamics has been developing a quadruped robot for the U.S. military called BigDog, which now almost perfectly emulates canine walk and could be used as a pack mule. By the 10th generation, the product should be great.

The pressure on financial engineers, in contrast, has been to compete to get new products out the door quickly, with their firms showing little patience for multiyear research and development. It's too bad these new products could not be labeled "beta," as technologists do when they need to warn that products are not fully tested and still need work.

Mr. Berners-Lee said his new approach could revolutionize financial markets, which are in dire need of better access to information. The continued lack of transparency about which banks own how much bad debt still paralyzes the system.

A challenge worthy even of the inventor of the Web is to reorganize information more creatively to help Wall Street better understand the data that drive markets up and down. The fastest way to economic recovery just might be a financial system rebuilt along the innovative lines of today's digital technology.