Crash – Perspectives

Machine readable news & the stock market [Article]

Robert N Charette writing for the IEEE spectrum is surprised that it took so long for a media hacking to take down Wall Street. If you had not heard yet, on the 23rd of April, an AP tweet said that there were two explosions in the White House & that Barack Obama was injured. In the three minutes that it took get the message repudiated, Wall Street had lost 143 points. The reason?

Partial blame for the rapid sell-off of stocks is being given to computer-driven trading algorithms that depend on machine readable news.

Texting while flying is dangerous, if you didn’t already know that -[Article]

An investigation into the crash of a Eurocopter AS350 B2 helicopter run by LifeNet says texting was one of the factors responsible.

“An examination of cell phone records showed that the pilot had made and received multiple personal calls and text messages throughout the afternoon while the helicopter was being inspected and prepared for flight, during the flight to the first hospital, while he was on the helipad at the hospital making mission-critical decisions about continuing or delaying the flight due to the [low] fuel situation, and during the accident flight.” The pilot violated company policy by texting while airborne,