Good morning.
For Whitewater, there’s a chance of a dusting of snow this morning, with a daytime high just above freezing. In Santa Fe, they’re also expecting snow (1-2 inches), and temperatures just below freezing.
On this day in 1864, Pres. Lincoln received a present a few days ahead of the twenty-fifth:
On Dec. 22, 1864, during the Civil War, Union Gen. William T. Sherman sent a message to President Lincoln from Georgia, saying, “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah.”
A market may be free, somewhat free, restricted, or (as a limitation on freedom) manipulated: Rachel Ehrenberg writes about suspicions of market manipulation in Smells Like a Bear Raid.
Two extraordinarily large trading days for Citigroup shares in the fall of 2007 hint that someone may have been manipulating the stock, say analysts who mine financial data using powerful computers and mathematical algorithms.
Researchers from the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Mass., were examining stock trading data for the period January 2007 to January 2009 when they noticed two unusually large spikes in volume and other measures related to Citigroup shares. On November 1, 2007, the team noted, the number of borrowed Citigroup shares jumped by 100 million, reaching a value of almost $6 billion. Six days later, a similar number of borrowed shares were returned on a single day, the team reports online December 14 at arXiv.org. The estimated gain for the investors who made the transactions was at least $640 million.
Such extreme events would be expected only once in a few hundred years, says Yaneer Bar-Yam, coauthor of the work. The likelihood of seeing those events six days apart is once in 4 billion years, the researchers’ calculations show.
Unlikely, yes; manipulation’s still in doubt:
Other researchers aren’t so certain that manipulation was at play. The analysis is an interesting case study, says financial economist Ekkehart Boehmer of the EDHEC Business School in Nice, France. But if the Citigroup trades were truly manipulative, the price should have gone back up after the deal was done.
It didn’t. Citigroup’s price kept falling. In fact, Boehmer says the traders would have made 10 times the money by waiting another two months to sell. “We can’t rule out manipulation, but we don’t have evidence of it either,” says Boehmer, who was director of research at the New York Stock Exchange from 2001 to 2003.
It’s curious, but a curiosity isn’t proof.
On this day in 1882, the first known use of electric lights on a Christmas tree:
An inventive New Yorker finds a brilliant application for electric lights and becomes the first person to use them as Christmas tree decorations.
Edward H. Johnson, who toiled for Thomas Edison’s Illumination Company and later became a company vice president, used 80 small red, white and blue electric bulbs, strung together along a single power cord, to light the Christmas tree in his New York home. Some sources credit Edison himself with being the first to use electric lights as Christmas decorations, when he strung them around his laboratory in 1880.
Sticking them on the tree was Johnson’s idea, though. It was a mere three years after Edison had demonstrated that light bulbs were practical at all.
The idea of replacing the Christmas tree’s traditional wax candles — which had been around since the mid-17th century — with electric lights didn’t, umm, catch fire right away. Although the stringed lights enjoyed a vogue with the wealthy and were being mass-produced as early as 1890, they didn’t become popular in humbler homes until a couple of decades into the 20th century.
From there, we made the journey to here: