Financial crises result from a catastrophic combination of actions. Vast stock market datasets offer us a window into some of the actions that have led to these crises. Here, we investigate whether data generated through Internet usage contain traces of attempts to gather information before trading decisions were taken. We present evidence in line with the intriguing suggestion that data on changes in how often financially related Wikipedia pages were viewed may have contained early signs of stock market moves. Our results suggest that online data may allow us to gain new insight into early information gathering stages of decision making.

We study the chiral properties of an SU(3) gauge theory with N{f} massless Dirac fermions in the fundamental representation when N{f} is increased from 2 to 6. For N{f}=2, our lattice simulations lead to a value of psi psi/F{3}, where F is the Nambu-Goldstone-boson decay constant and psi psi is the chiral condensate, which agrees with the measured QCD value. For N{f}=6, this ratio shows significant enhancement, presaging an even larger enhancement anticipated as N{f} increases further, toward the critical value for transition from confinement to infrared conformality.

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We study the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita together with the market capitalization (MCAP) per capita as two indicators of the effect of globalization. We find that g, the GDP per capita, as a function of m, the MCAP per capita, follows a power law with average exponent close to 1/3. In addition, the Zipf ranking approach confirms that the m for countries with initially lower values of m tends to grow more rapidly than for countries with initially larger values of m. If the trends over the past 20 years continue to hold in the future, then the Zipf ranking approach leads to the prediction that in about 50 years, all countries participating in globalization will have comparable values of their MCAP per capita. We call this economic state "capital death," in analogy to the physics state of "heat death" predicted by thermodynamic arguments.

We describe initial results by the Lattice Strong Dynamics (LSD) collaboration of a study into the variation of chiral properties of SU(3) Yang-Mills gauge theory as the number of massless flavors changes from N f = 2 to N f = 6, with a focus on the use of chiral perturbation theory.