Disruptions: Rather Than Time, Computers Might Become Panacea to Hurt

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Computers Piecing Together Jigsaw of Jewish Lore

The idea is to harness technology to help reassemble more than 100,000 document fragments collected across 1,000 years that reveal details of Jewish life along the Mediterranean, including marriage, medicine and mysticism. For decades, scholars relied mainly on memory to match up pieces of the Cairo genizah, a treasure trove of papers that include works by the rabbinical scholar Maimonides, parts of Torah scrolls and prayer books, reams of poetry and personal letters, contracts, and court documents, even recipes (there is a particularly vile one for honey-wine).

Now, for the first time, a sophisticated artificial intelligence program running on a powerful computer network is conducting 4.5 trillion calculations per second to vastly narrow down the possibilities.

“In one hour, the computer can compare 10 million pairs — 10 million pairs is something a human being cannot do in a lifetime,” said Roni Shweka, who has advanced degrees in both computers and Talmud and is helping lead the effort. “It’s going to be a very powerful tool for every researcher today that’s going to work on one fragment. In a few seconds, he’ll be able to find the other fragments, like finding the needle in the hay.”

The genizah project is part of a growing movement to unleash advanced technology on the humanities. In recent years, geeks and poets have been collaborating on databases and digital mapping that are transforming the study of history, literature, music and more.

Recovered in 1896 from a storeroom of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo, this cache of documents was collected from the ninth century to the 19th, awaiting burial as required by Jewish law for anything bearing God’s name. But because a genizah is essentially a garbage can, most of the manuscripts were tattered and torn; Solomon Schechter, one of the earliest to study the collection, called it “a battlefield of books.”

The 320,000 pages and parts of pages — in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Judeo-Arabic (Arabic transliterated into Hebrew letters) — were scattered in 67 libraries and private collections around the world, only a fraction of them collated and cataloged. More than 200 volumes and thousands of academic papers have been published based on the material, most focused on a single fragment or a few. Perhaps 4,000 have been pieced together through a painstaking, expensive, exclusive process that relied a lot on luck.

“We see a document in Cambridge, England, and another in St. Petersburg, Russia, and we think if the handwriting matches,” explained Mark R. Cohen, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University who has been studying the genizah since 1972. Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, a paleographer at the Sorbonne, acknowledged that such work is left “to charms and your memory — and whether you are tired or not, and whether it rings a bell or not; this is not very scientific.”

The digitization is part of a nearly $20 million effort to organize and explore the genizah that a Canadian hedge-fund mogul, Dr. Albert Friedberg, began in 1997.

First there was a computerized inventory of 301,000 fragments, some as small as an inch. Next came 450,000 high-quality photographs, on blue backgrounds to highlight visual cues, and a Web site where researchers can browse, compare, and consult thousands of bibliographic citations of published material.

The latest experiment involves more than 100 linked computers located in a basement room at Tel Aviv University here, cooled by standup fans. They are analyzing 500 visual cues for each of 157,514 fragments, to check a total of 12,405,251,341 possible pairings. The process began May 16 and should be done around June 25, according to an estimate on the project’s Web site.

Yaacov Choueka, a retired professor of computer science who runs the Friedberg-financed Genazim project in Jerusalem, said the goals are not only to democratize access to the documents and speed up the elusive challenge of joining fragments, but to harness the computer’s ability to pose new research questions.

“Which is really what computers should do, not just process salaries and monitor traffic,” said Professor Choueka, who was a leader of the team at Bar-Ilan University that developed the Responsa Project, an electronic collection of questions and answers about Jewish law that won a prestigious Israel Prize in 2007.

“I want from the computer to give me something new, a new horizon, a new tool that was never there before.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 28, 2013

An earlier version of this article described incompletely the winner of a prestigious Israel Prize. The winner of a prize in 2007 was the Responsa Project, which was created by a team at Bar-Ilan University whose leaders included Professor Yaacov Choueka. Professor Choueka was not an individual recipient of the prize.  

Apple-1 Computers Jump in Value at Auctions

“Of course,” Mr. Spicer added, “I could have paid off my mortgage now with what it would be worth.”

Perhaps so. Last November, an Apple-1, also commonly known as the Apple I, sold for $640,000 at an auction in Germany. That sale surpassed the previous record of $374,500 set only five months earlier at Sotheby’s in New York.

The astronomical run-up in the price of the original Apple-1 machines — made in 1976 and priced at $666.66 (about $2,700 in current dollars) — is a story of the economics of scarcity and techno-fetishism, magnified by the mystique surrounding Apple and its founders, as the company has become one of the largest, most profitable corporations in the world.

The next test of the Apple-1 market comes on Saturday, at the same auction house in Cologne, Germany, where the record sale took place last November.

Even the auctioneer, Uwe Breker, expressed some surprise at the price reached last fall. For this week’s auction, the reserve price — the minimum sale price — is $116,000, and Mr. Breker conservatively estimated the likely range from $260,000 to $400,000. “But we will see,” he said.

The auction market for the vintage machines, experts say, is thin and uncertain. For example, a nonworking Apple-1 failed to attract its reserve price of just over $75,000 at an auction last year in London. The record-setting auctions last year were of working originals, as is the Apple-1 going under the gavel on Saturday.

The sky-high prices suggest irrational exuberance. But technology historians say there is a rational appeal to possessing an Apple-1. “It is Apple’s creation story, the physical artifact that traces this incredible success to its origins,” said Mr. Spicer, a senior curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

The Apple-1, Mr. Spicer added, was instrumental in the early transition in personal computing from its hobbyist roots to becoming a huge commercial business. Others were there too, notably the MITS Altair, which was introduced before the Apple-1, and was the first personal computer that Microsoft’s founders, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, wrote software for.

But Apple proved to be the enduring computer maker. And its founders embodied the hobbyist-commercial shift. Stephen G. Wozniak was the hardware-hacking engineer and Steven P. Jobs, who died in 2011 after a battle with cancer, was the business visionary.

Apple-1’s are scarce. An estimated 175 to 200 were produced in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos, Calif. Mike Willegal, who maintains an online registry of Apple-1’s, has verified the existence of 46 of them. A software manager at Cisco, Mr. Willegal observed that there was a technical nostalgia to the Apple-1, recalling a simpler time in computing.

“No one understands a whole computer system anymore,” Mr. Willegal said. “But Woz” — Mr. Wozniak’s nickname — “knew that board inside and out, and some people do today.”

A computer motherboard with clusters of chips was all that the bare-bones Apple-1 offered. Users had to supply their own keyboards, monitors and power supplies. It had 4 kilobytes of memory; a basic MacBook Air has more than a million times that. It could be used to run primitive computer games and write simple programs.

The Apple-1 was a reputation-building entry, but it was the Apple II, introduced a year later in 1977, that would sell in the millions and establish the company’s business. When Mr. Wozniak was designing the Apple II, he was also handling customer service for the Apple-1, a distracting time drain.

After the Apple II went on sale, the company began an aggressive trade-in program, offering Apple II’s and sometimes cash incentives in exchange for Apple-1’s, said Bob Luther, who is writing a book on the vintage machines, “The First Apple,” which he plans to self-publish, with help from a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign.

In his book research, Mr. Luther called Michael Scott, Apple’s president from 1977 to 1981, and interviewed him about the trade-in program. As Mr. Luther recalled, Mr. Scott told him, “If we had done a better job, you and I wouldn’t be having this phone call.”

“They just wanted the Apple-1 to go away,” said Mr. Luther, who bought an Apple-1 for $7,600 in 2004. (“Mine’s not for sale.”)

Auction prices for Apple-1’s have not yet settled on firm standards. But according to Richard Austin, head of books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s, who handled the auction of the Apple-1 for $374,500 last year, working machines in pristine condition with documentation command the highest prices. “And a story behind it helps,” Mr. Austin added.

The Apple-1 being auctioned on Saturday has a story. Its original owner was Fred Hatfield, a retired electrical engineer living in New Orleans.

The documentation with the machine includes a letter to Mr. Hatfield, signed by Steve Jobs, offering him a new Apple II and a check for $400 for his Apple-1, said Mr. Breker, the German auctioneer. Mr. Hatfield declined the offer, for whatever reason.

Mr. Breker is irritatingly discreet about the identity of the seller, saying only that he is a young American who works for a software company. “He brought it over here in a blanket,” Mr. Breker said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 25, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the identity of the original owner of an Apple-1 being auctioned on Saturday in Germany. The owner was Fred Hatfield, a retired electrical engineer living in New Orleans, not the Fred Hatfield who was a former professional baseball player who died in 1998.

Bits Blog: A Place Where Old Computers Go to Live

An I.B.M. computer control panel at the museum was recently outfitted with L.E.D. lights.

SEATTLE — Paul Allen, Microsoft’s other founder, with Bill Gates, has a number of museums. There is the Jimi Hendrix Music Experience and his Flying Heritage Collection. The common theme is “hands on.” You can play a musical instrument and the planes fly.

That is no less true for the Living Computer Museum, a relatively new addition. Housed in a three-story warehouse south of downtown Seattle, its striking feature is that almost all the computers, even those manufactured in the 1960s, actually work.

The showcase machines are legends — like the Digital Equipment Corporation KL-10 introduced in 1974 and esoteric XKL TOAD-1, a clone of the DEC10. (The Digital Equipment meme runs throughout the museum, possibly because these are the computers Mr. Allen grew up programming.)

Opened rather quietly last fall, the museum hasn‘t attracted much publicity. That may be true in part because it appears that the collection has been intended for Mr. Allen and his more technical friends, as much as the general public. Indeed, the showcase computers, housed in a realistic “machine room,” are systems you probably have never heard of — unless you were a computer hacker in the 1960s or 1970s.

One sign that the museum may continue to cater to a rather elite clientele is the party that Mr. Allen held on Tuesday evening to introduce the museum to 150 industry pioneers and a handful of computer journalists — as least those who were writing about computers in the 1970s.

Attendees included pioneers from a number of computing eras: Mr. Gates, of course — the two men posed together, recreating an iconic picture from the 1980s; Bob Frankston and Dan Fylstra of Visicalc (the first spreadsheet); Chris Espinosa, who worked with Steve Jobs in the original garage; Larry Tesler, who came to Apple from Xerox PARC to help design the Lisa; Les Ernest, the assistant director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who could arguably be said to have invented the predecessors of both Facebook and Twitter; Lee Felsenstein, the designer of two early personal computers, the SOL and the Osborne 1; Nolan Bushnell of Atari; Esther Dyson, one of the first PC industry impresarios, and her brother George, the computer historian.

Then there was John Draper, known as “Captain Crunch” for discovering an inexpensive method for getting free phone calls by using the whistle from a cereal box. Mr. Draper, who said he is working on his memoirs and now living in Las Vegas, gently teased Mr. Gates, because it was Mr. Draper’s word processor, known as EZ Writer, that I.B.M. chose to offer with the first PC in 1981. Mr. Gates had not yet developed Word.

Mr. Gates said he remembered Mr. Draper, who was indirectly instrumental in creating Apple Computer, by teaching the company’s two founders how to make phone fraud devices known as Blue Boxes. (Mr. Jobs and Stephen Wozniak then sold the devices to raise money to start Apple.)

That Mr. Allen has managed to resurrect so many historic computers is remarkable. He has done it with a relatively small team of seven engineers and a handful of outside consultants. In some cases they have gone to extraordinary lengths to recreate machines where the original instruction manuals have long since vanished.

In other cases they have had to finesse the job, when original parts are no longer available or frequently fail. For example, Keith Perez, the lead restoration engineer for the museum, acknowledged that the beautiful display panel of flashing lights for a vintage IBM 360 now blinked with the aid of a number of LED lights. The originals burned out frequently, even at lower than normal power settings, he said.

At the end of the event, two buses took Mr. Allen’s guests to a downtown hotel for dinner, where engineers swapped tall tales from various computer eras. Before he left for the evening Mr. Allen told the group that when he and Mr. Gates worked for MITS, the maker of the first personal computer, in Albuquerque, he would handle telephone support calls after he finished his day job of writing software.

The computer maker had underpriced the machine at $439, and it was such a hot seller that to lower its costs the company had begun shipping the machine without any internal memory. People would then call to say they had assembled the computer and turned it on and it didn’t work, he recalled. Mr. Allen would then ask them if all the lights on the computer’s front panel were lit. If they were, that meant there was no DRAM (dynamic random access memory) in the computer, known as the Altair.

When he told the callers this, he said, they would invariably ask, “What’s memory?”

New Test for Computers: Grading Essays at College Level

And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that the system would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve your grade.

EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.

The new service will bring the educational consortium into a growing conflict over the role of automation in education. Although automated grading systems for multiple-choice and true-false tests are now widespread, the use of artificial intelligence technology to grade essay answers has not yet received widespread endorsement by educators and has many critics.

Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX, predicted that the instant-grading software would be a useful pedagogical tool, enabling students to take tests and write essays over and over and improve the quality of their answers. He said the technology would offer distinct advantages over the traditional classroom system, where students often wait days or weeks for grades.

“There is a huge value in learning with instant feedback,” Dr. Agarwal said. “Students are telling us they learn much better with instant feedback.”

But skeptics say the automated system is no match for live teachers. One longtime critic, Les Perelman, has drawn national attention several times for putting together nonsense essays that have fooled software grading programs into giving high marks. He has also been highly critical of studies that purport to show that the software compares well to human graders.

“My first and greatest objection to the research is that they did not have any valid statistical test comparing the software directly to human graders,” said Mr. Perelman, a retired director of writing and a current researcher at M.I.T.

He is among a group of educators who last month began circulating a petition opposing automated assessment software. The group, which calls itself Professionals Against Machine Scoring of Student Essays in High-Stakes Assessment, has collected nearly 2,000 signatures, including some from luminaries like Noam Chomsky.

“Let’s face the realities of automatic essay scoring,” the group’s statement reads in part. “Computers cannot ‘read.’ They cannot measure the essentials of effective written communication: accuracy, reasoning, adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical stance, convincing argument, meaningful organization, clarity, and veracity, among others.”

But EdX expects its software to be adopted widely by schools and universities. EdX offers free online classes from Harvard, M.I.T. and the University of California, Berkeley; this fall, it will add classes from Wellesley, Georgetown and the University of Texas. In all, 12 universities participate in EdX, which offers certificates for course completion and has said that it plans to continue to expand next year, including adding international schools.

The EdX assessment tool requires human teachers, or graders, to first grade 100 essays or essay questions. The system then uses a variety of machine-learning techniques to train itself to be able to grade any number of essays or answers automatically and almost instantaneously.

The software will assign a grade depending on the scoring system created by the teacher, whether it is a letter grade or numerical rank. It will also provide general feedback, like telling a student whether an answer was on topic or not.

Dr. Agarwal said he believed that the software was nearing the capability of human grading.

“This is machine learning and there is a long way to go, but it’s good enough and the upside is huge,” he said. “We found that the quality of the grading is similar to the variation you find from instructor to instructor.”

EdX is not the first to use automated assessment technology, which dates to early mainframe computers in the 1960s. There is now a range of companies offering commercial programs to grade written test answers, and four states — Louisiana, North Dakota, Utah and West Virginia — are using some form of the technology in secondary schools. A fifth, Indiana, has experimented with it. In some cases the software is used as a “second reader,” to check the reliability of the human graders.

India’s Aakash Venture Produces Optimism but Few Computers

Enthusiasts saw the plan as a way to bring modern touch-screen computing to some of the world’s poorest people while seeding a technology manufacturing industry in India. Legions of customers placed advance orders for a commercial version of the tablet, thrilled at the prospect of owning tangible proof that India was a leader in “frugal innovation.”

Even the secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, lavished praise on the audacious project, called Aakash, the Hindi word for sky. “India is a superpower on the information superhighway,” Mr. Ban said at a ceremony in November at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

Stoking expectations was Suneet Singh Tuli, the charismatic C.E.O. of the small London-based company that won the bid. “I am creating a product at a lower price than anyone else in the world with the hope that it impacts people’s lives and I make money out of it,” he said in a recent interview.

But over the last few months, it has become increasingly evident that Mr. Tuli, 44, and his older brother, Raja Singh Tuli, 46, are unable to deliver on most of their ambitious promises.

The Tulis acknowledge that their company, DataWind, will not even come close to shipping the 100,000 tablets it has promised to India’s colleges and universities before its year-end deadline. Most of the 10,000 or so tablets delivered through early December were made in China, despite the company’s early pledge to manufacture in India. Financial statements filed with British regulators show that the company is deeply in the red.

And the project’s entire premise — that India can make a cheap tablet computer that will somehow make up for failures of the country’s crippled education system — is fundamentally flawed, according to some experts in education and manufacturing.

Leigh L. Linden, an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin who has studied the use of technology in schools in India and other developing countries, said that, at best, computers merely match the performance gains from far less costly projects that involve hiring additional teachers or teaching assistants. And in some cases, Professor Linden said, the introduction of computers can actually lower students’ test results.

“Based on the available research,” he said, “this would not be the most effective strategy for education in developing countries.”

The notion that India’s weak manufacturing sector can catch up to China in advanced computer hardware also strikes some experts as far-fetched. “China became the manufacturing center of the world, and India missed that boat,” said Surjit S. Bhalla, an economist and managing director of Oxus Investments.

So far, the Indian government is standing firmly behind the project.

“All pathbreaking ideas do look too ambitious when conceived,” the Ministry of Human Resource Development, which oversees the Aakash project, said in an e-mailed statement. Aakash is “an all-encompassing project,” not just the creation of a tablet computer, the ministry said. With it, the government plans to create “an entire manufacturing ecosystem” in India.

Interviews with DataWind executives, government officials, Chinese manufacturers, business partners and former and current employees paint a picture of a small family company that was overwhelmed by a complex project that even China’s cutthroat technology manufacturers would find challenging to execute at the price expected by the government.

Leading a tour last month of the company’s small touch-screen factory in downtown Montreal, Raja Tuli, DataWind’s co-chairman and chief technology officer, said he had initially opposed his brother’s desire to bid on the Aakash contract, and he expressed lingering regrets.

“We got stuck in it,” he said. “We’re doing our best.”

DataWind’s real goal, Mr. Tuli said, is to sell low-cost wireless Internet access for tablets in developing countries like India. He said DataWind’s proprietary data compression technology, which made its debut in Britain years ago with a device called the PocketSurfer, efficiently delivers Web pages over older, slower cellphone networks.

“Our biggest contribution is our software,” Mr. Tuli said. “The fact that we’re making the actual hardware is a sideline that we got into in the process. We never meant to do it, but here we are.”

For India’s government, the Aakash project was supposed to usher in a computer revolution.

Pamposh Raina reported from New Delhi and Amritsar, India, Ian Austen from Montreal and Heather Timmons from New Delhi. Mia Li contributed reporting from Beijing.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 31, 2012

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly on second reference to Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general. He is Mr. Ban, not Mr. Ki-moon.

Bits Blog: Rented Computers Captured Customers Having Sex, F.T.C. Says

If you rented a computer, you probably should not have been blogging without your shirt on.

On Tuesday, seven computer rental companies agreed to a settlement with the federal government after it was discovered that they were unlawfully capturing photos of customers by using illicit software that controlled a computer’s webcam.

The Federal Trade Commission said the seven companies involved had worked with DesignerWare, a Pennsylvania-based software maker, to create a program that secretly captured “webcam pictures of children, partially undressed individuals, and intimate activities at home.” This included people who while engaging in sexual activities in their homes were being recorded on their rental computers.

The webcam software, called PC Rental Agent, had been installed on approximately 420,000 computers worldwide, according to the F.T.C., and as of August 2011 it was being used by approximately 1,617 rent-to-own stores in the United States, Canada and Australia.

In a news release issued by the F.T.C., Jon Leibowitz, the agency’s chairman, said the software had also captured consumers’ private e-mails, bank account information and medical records. In some instances the software was able to capture Social Security numbers, medical records and doctor’s names. Most disturbing, the webcam captured pictures of children.

The reality that nearly half a million people were so intensely spied upon without their knowledge highlighted what some say is a need for more oversight by government officials for people who do not own their own computers. Lisa Madigan, the Illinois attorney general, said: “There is no justification for spying on customers. These tactics are offensive invasions of personal privacy.”

The settlement agreed upon by the F.T.C. will ban the rent-to-own companies from using monitoring software of any kind and prohibit the companies from tracking a user’s location without that person’s knowledge or consent. All of the stores involved are also prohibited from using any of the information collected from the computers to collect outstanding debts.  The companies will also be monitored by the F.T.C. for the next 20 years.

The companies involved in the settlement include: Aspen Way Enterprises; the Watershed Development Corporation, which operates under the names Watershed and Aaron’s Sales & Lease Ownership; Showplace Rent-to-Own; J.A.G. Rents, operating under the name ColorTyme; B. Stamper Enterprises, which operated under the name Premier Rental Purchase; and C.A.L.M. Ventures, which also operates under the public name Premier Rental Purchase.

News Analysis: Computers Trade Quickly, but Leave No Time to Think

Most of the time.

Unfortunately, the improved markets also are more prone to disaster. The same computerization and increased competition that provided the benefits also weeded out people who had the obligation to step up in times of stress, and virtually eliminated the ability of people and institutions to slow or halt markets when something goes badly wrong.

And with technological innovation continuing apace, the risks may have increased. Regulators can require changes that will prevent an exact repeat of any given disaster, as they did after the flash crash of May 6, 2010, but there appears to be no way to guess what will be the immediate cause of the next problem. And that problem may be huge. On Wednesday, computers at Knight Capital Group, a firm that executes millions of stock trades every day, went haywire.

Unintended orders spewed forth and some stocks gyrated wildly. It took the firm the better part of an hour to turn off its computers, and on Thursday it estimated its losses at $440 million.

Knight, one of the biggest players in the stock market, said it was exploring strategic alternatives. That is a polite way of saying it is desperately searching for a buyer.

It may be worthwhile to consider what would have happened a few decades ago had a computer somehow done the same thing.

The orders would have flooded into specialists at the New York Stock Exchange — people who had a duty to make markets — or to the market makers in Nasdaq stocks who had a similar responsibility. Some of the stupid orders might have been executed, but trading in the affected stocks would have come to a halt within minutes while people tried to figure out what was going on. There would have been red faces at the firm responsible, but much less red ink.

Those market makers are largely gone now. Their sources of profit — the spreads between what they sold stocks for and what they would pay for them — have vanished with competition and rule changes that allow share prices to move by one cent or less, rather than the one-eighth of a dollar, or 12.5 cents, that used to be the minimum change.

Market makers have been largely replaced by high-frequency traders who use computers that can react to orders in nanoseconds. They send in orders — and cancel them — far faster than any human could hope to do.

Exchanges, knowing that they need market makers who will take the other side of customer orders, offer rebates to high-frequency traders who manage to fill a lot of orders. In normal times, the result is markets that are highly liquid and very fast.

Decades ago, the size of an order that could be executed was limited by the capital available to the stock exchange specialist, and it was necessary for Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs and Salomon Brothers to fill the role for large institutional orders. There are enough high-frequency firms that big orders can now be filled quickly and at lower costs.

However, those high-frequency traders have no obligation to hang around and continue to make markets when things get dicey. There was plenty of criticism of the specialists and market makers in the old days. We are approaching the 25th anniversary of the 1987 crash, when many Nasdaq market makers panicked and decided that the safer course was to not answer their phones.

But the market makers generally met their responsibilities. If they were unwilling to do so, perhaps because of a flood of orders to sell a particular stock, the market in that stock would simply shut down for a time. That pause would give others time to see what was happening, and anyone who thought the market move was unreasonable could step in and offer to buy the stock.

Now, many of the high-frequency traders — who have no power to halt trading, even if their computers somehow concluded that was wise — have simply programmed their computers to get out of a market if it is going crazy. The result is that markets may have far less liquidity when that liquidity is needed most.

To get the advantages that come with being listed as market makers, high-frequency firms were required to usually have offers posted to buy and sell the stocks in which they made markets. That rule led to the stub bid. If things were going crazy, the firm would put in a bid of $1 a share for a $40 stock. It met the requirement, but obviously no one would be stupid enough to sell at that price.

Unless that someone were a computer.

News Analysis: Computers Trade Quickly, but Leave No Time to Think

Most of the time.

Unfortunately, the improved markets also are more prone to disaster. The same computerization and increased competition that provided the benefits also weeded out people who had the obligation to step up in times of stress, and virtually eliminated the ability of people and institutions to slow or halt markets when something goes badly wrong.

And with technological innovation continuing apace, the risks may have increased. Regulators can require changes that will prevent an exact repeat of any given disaster, as they did after the flash crash of May 6, 2010, but there appears to be no way to guess what will be the immediate cause of the next problem. And that problem may be huge. On Wednesday, computers at Knight Capital Group, a firm that executes millions of stock trades every day, went haywire.

Unintended orders spewed forth and some stocks gyrated wildly. It took the firm the better part of an hour to turn off its computers, and on Thursday it estimated its losses at $440 million.

Knight, one of the biggest players in the stock market, said it was exploring strategic alternatives. That is a polite way of saying it is desperately searching for a buyer.

It may be worthwhile to consider what would have happened a few decades ago had a computer somehow done the same thing.

The orders would have flooded into specialists at the New York Stock Exchange — people who had a duty to make markets — or to the market makers in Nasdaq stocks who had a similar responsibility. Some of the stupid orders might have been executed, but trading in the affected stocks would have come to a halt within minutes while people tried to figure out what was going on. There would have been red faces at the firm responsible, but much less red ink.

Those market makers are largely gone now. Their sources of profit — the spreads between what they sold stocks for and what they would pay for them — have vanished with competition and rule changes that allow share prices to move by one cent or less, rather than the one-eighth of a dollar, or 12.5 cents, that used to be the minimum change.

Market makers have been largely replaced by high-frequency traders who use computers that can react to orders in nanoseconds. They send in orders — and cancel them — far faster than any human could hope to do.

Exchanges, knowing that they need market makers who will take the other side of customer orders, offer rebates to high-frequency traders who manage to fill a lot of orders. In normal times, the result is markets that are highly liquid and very fast.

Decades ago, the size of an order that could be executed was limited by the capital available to the stock exchange specialist, and it was necessary for Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs and Salomon Brothers to fill the role for large institutional orders. There are enough high-frequency firms that big orders can now be filled quickly and at lower costs.

However, those high-frequency traders have no obligation to hang around and continue to make markets when things get dicey. There was plenty of criticism of the specialists and market makers in the old days. We are approaching the 25th anniversary of the 1987 crash, when many Nasdaq market makers panicked and decided that the safer course was to not answer their phones.

But the market makers generally met their responsibilities. If they were unwilling to do so, perhaps because of a flood of orders to sell a particular stock, the market in that stock would simply shut down for a time. That pause would give others time to see what was happening, and anyone who thought the market move was unreasonable could step in and offer to buy the stock.

Now, many of the high-frequency traders — who have no power to halt trading, even if their computers somehow concluded that was wise — have simply programmed their computers to get out of a market if it is going crazy. The result is that markets may have far less liquidity when that liquidity is needed most.

To get the advantages that come with being listed as market makers, high-frequency firms were required to usually have offers posted to buy and sell the stocks in which they made markets. That rule led to the stub bid. If things were going crazy, the firm would put in a bid of $1 a share for a $40 stock. It met the requirement, but obviously no one would be stupid enough to sell at that price.

Unless that someone were a computer.

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Moving Bookmarks Between Computers

How do I transfer my Internet browsers’ bookmarks (Internet Explorer and Firefox) from a Windows XP computer to a new computer with Windows 7?

Both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox offer a few ways to transfer your bookmarks from one machine to another. For a manual approach, you can export the bookmarks to a file with the old browser to a USB drive, and then plug the drive into the new computer so you can import the bookmarks into the new browser. Mozilla has steps for Firefox here and Microsoft has instructions for the export/import process with Internet Explorer here.

You can also transfer bookmarks between computers with a syncing program. Mozilla’s own Firefox Sync is one option for its browser and there are others out there, like Xmarks. Since you are moving between Windows machines, Microsoft’s Windows Easy Transfer program can move bookmarks, as well as other settings.