News You Can Bruise for 2006 April 15

Sumana just mentioned levels of referentiality. Among people who weren't deliberately aiming to maximize levels of referentiality, who has achieved the most levels and how?

clorox bottle easter baskets. Alert MAKE Magazine!

I realize that this is my third entry on the topic, but the Cookbook is now 100% done and submitted.

Rainer Böhme sent me a copy of his stock spam paper, which is really interesting (I'll link to it when it's put up publicly). It demonstrates two results I found interesting: on average, stock spam does increase the price of a stock, but the effect decays and after four days the stock price is lower than before. Second, the greater the volume of spam you send, the bigger the effect.

Entering the realm of speculation, there's also an indication that stock spam actually destroys wealth by reducing the capitalization of the spammed companies over the long-term (though maybe the wealth just leaves the stock market and goes into the spammers' pockets). Also includes a movie-plot scenario where spammers use the techniques of stock spam to start runs on banks. An entertaining paper. And it mentions me, which is awesome.