Burgess Dialog
with Alan Longley

Raising the question of the progress and utilization of software tools

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

alan longley
Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 4:50 PM
To: Peter Burgess

Hello Peter,

I read your email summarizing your initiatives, ' (1) energy efficiency investment (2) community development (3) community currency; and, (4) valuadd accountancy can be progressed. '. Disregarding energy efficiency for now, I would like to make some observations concerning TrueValueMetrics, which seems to be the keystone for the other 3 initiatives. You say that, among its competitors, TrueValueMetrics is '... the only one that aims to integrate valuadd with money profit in a single system.' This is at loggerheads with the spirit of what you say on the truevaluemetrics website: 'It is time for the weaknesses of the money profit capitalist market economic system to be reformed.' This sounds like leftist bashing of capitalism, though I realize that, in a careful reading, it isn't so negative. But this is a header on your website; you might be scaring off good readers.

TrueValueMetrics identifies the huge discrepancy between our accounting capabilities and the standards of practice. A parallel discrepancy is the gap between what we are capable of technologically and the standards of practice in economics and finance. Below is one of my blog posts concerning this issue.

Tinsel Economy

Item forwarded ... this can be found at http://quantcorner.com/?p=88 www.nengo.ca

Posted on July 15, 2012

Los Angeles once was called Tinsel Town. I haven’t heard this much recently. Perhaps this is because Hollywood’s arts have spread so widely throughout the economy that it doesn’t make sense to blame the tawdriness on LA anymore.

The intense demand for video throughout the Internet caused the evolution of graphics processing through Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to proceed much more rapidly than the evolution of CPUs. The result is that GPUs have, in general, vastly more processing capability than CPUs, yet very little software is configured to take advantage of this processing capability for computation rather than graphics. Although this is changing , the imbalance between our capabilities and our somewhat humble achievements is galling, particularly in regards finance and economics.

Do you realize there are competing physics engines, used, for instance, in gaming? The PhysX physics engine now comes with associated hardware, Physics Processing Units (PPUs). This represents a high degree of standardization of complex mathematics.

In the biological, and biochemical sciences, there is a standard called Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML), which standardizes the simulation of complex biological and biochemical processes, including, say, stochastic modeling with the Gillespie algorithm.

But there are no standards for modeling in finance. And Excel just doesn’t cut it. Brain simulation software does. Nengo, www.nengo.ca , could serve as a prototype for financial modeling.