LA CROSSE, Wis. (WKBT) – During his speech at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Thursday, President Barack Obama rolled out his plan to guarantee overtime pay for millions more salaried workers across the country. article…
The New York Stock Exchange opened normally Thursday, after computer problems forced the exchange to shut down for much of the day on Wednesday.
KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:
Things were back to normal at the New York Stock Exchange today. Yesterday, a faulty software upgrade forced the nation’s oldest stock exchange to suspend trading for nearly four hours. The explanation is that a technical glitch made it hard for the trading software to communicate with other systems, so orders couldn’t be processed. The incident is a big embarrassment even though it didn’t cause much of a problem for most investors. NPR’s Jim Zarroli reports.
JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: In the eyes of most people, the floor of the New York Stock Exchange is synonymous with the stock market, and so much about the exchange, from the busy trading pits to the closing bell, have become fixtures of American life. But the NYSE has changed dramatically in just the past 10 years, and it’s likely to keep changing, says Robert Battalio, professor of finance at Notre Dame.
ROBERT BATTALIO: At least for my generation, it symbolizes capitalism and all, right? But I think, you know, in 20, 30 years, it’s not going to have the same meaning, is my guess.
ZARROLI: The past few years have seen a proliferation of new electronic markets that compete with the NYSE, and federal regulations require each trade to be executed on the market that provides the best price. JJ Kinahan is chief market strategist at TD Ameritrade.
JJ KINAHAN: If you look at 20 years ago where the only place to really trade was the New York Stock Exchange, there are multiple venues now to go to with your orders. So there may be a better bid or a better offer at another venue.
ZARROLI: The spread of these new trading venues has made the market a lot more complex, but Kinahan says it’s also made stock trading less vulnerable to technical problems.
KINAHAN: And I think people lose sight of this. If you think about 20 years ago, if the phone system went down, trading would have stopped ’cause there was only one venue.
ZARROLI: Today, when one market experiences a glitch, trades can quickly be routed to competing exchanges, says Robert Battalio.
BATTALIO: The idea was, if one goes down, that market just pulls away, and trading continues, which is kind of what you saw yesterday.
ZARROLI: The NYSE’s parent company has struggled to compete by opening new electronic exchanges of its own, but by some estimates, only about a fifth of stock trades now go through the NYSE. Again, Robert Battalio.
BATTALIO: If you’re a retail investor, that order gets routed to either Citadel or Susquehanna, and it trades instantaneously at the best quote. It doesn’t even make it to the New York Stock Exchange.
ZARROLI: But the New York Stock Exchange does play a unique role in some ways. For one thing, both the NYSE and NASDAQ have strict standards about what companies they’ll list. They have to follow certain governance rules. A lot of big institutional investors like mutual funds won’t buy shares that aren’t listed. Chester Spatt is a former economist at the Securities and Exchange Commission who now teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.
CHESTER SPATT: It’s not so much, I think, that investors now care as much about what platform they do their execution on, but I still think having an NYSE listing is powerful branding.
ZARROLI: The NYSE also is responsible for setting the opening and closing prices of stocks, and these prices are widely used throughout the financial markets. But much of what made the NYSE dominate stock trading for so long is gone. I asked Robert Battalio whether the NYSE is even necessary anymore.
BATTALIO: That’s a fantastic question, and I guess the answer would be, is, if they disappeared, I think somebody else would come in to fill the void, almost for sure.
ZARROLI: The NYSE has history and tradition on its side, but as yesterday’s outage showed, it’s also having to compete in a world where the rules have very much changed. Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.
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Let’s see: fever, headache and dizziness. iStockphoto hide caption
itoggle caption iStockphoto
We’ve all been there before: headache, dizziness, sore throat. Uh-oh! Better Google the symptoms or maybe try WebMD’s online symptom checker to see what’s wrong.
But how accurate are these online symptoms checkers, anyway?
Turns out, millions of people are entrusting their health to some pretty lousy diagnostic systems.
Researchers tested 23 online symptom checkers and found that the correct diagnosis was provided first on a list of potential illnesses only about a third of the time. That means symptom checkers are spitting out wrong diagnoses two-thirds of the time.
“People who use these tools should be aware of their inaccuracy and not see them as gospel,” says Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, who led the research and is a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. “They shouldn’t think that whatever the symptom checker says is what they have.”
The study, published Wednesday in The BMJ, examined some of the most popular online symptoms checkers, including Ask MD, iTriage, one from the U.K.’s National Health Service and another from the Mayo Clinic.
Each website was fed 45 standard patient vignettes with symptoms consistent with medical conditions ranging from acute liver failure and meningitis to mononucleosis and a simple bee sting.
The final information provided by the symptom checkers varied. Some provided a diagnosis, while others offered recommendations for care, such as stay at home, go to a doctor or head to the ER right away.
These treatment recommendations were right on compared to diagnosis accuracy, the research team says — at least when it came to emergency situations. In cases where the patients were seriously ill, the systems accurately urged them to head to the ER 80 percent of the time.
Timely treatment, Mehrotra says, is more important than getting the diagnosis exactly right. “If a patient isn’t feeling well, they’re thinking, ‘Is this something I have to take care of right away or can I stay home?'” he says. “We do not think distinguishing the exact problem is as important as getting to the hospital right away.”
On the other hand, the researchers found that the symptom checkers were overly cautious when it came to patients who had little cause for concern, suggesting they head to a clinic when staying home and having chicken soup was appropriate.
“Using computers to help diagnose and manage care is a new frontier,” Mehrotra says. “This is just the first generation [of symptoms checkers], and I’m hopeful that this research can help them improve.”
iMedicalApps founder Dr. Iltifat Husain agrees and is hopeful that the mobile health world will “mature and grow up” with time. Because current symptom checkers are so new, Husain, says he wasn’t surprised by the results.
“This is pretty consistent with what you see with medical-related apps out there now,” he says. “More and more studies are finding that apps are not using evidence-based techniques and that they don’t adequately reference medical content.”
However, that doesn’t stop Husain — an ER doctor at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center — from recommending online systems and apps like symptom checkers.
“If used appropriately, these apps can help raise red flags so a patient is more proactive and seeks care in a timely fashion,” he says. “Nailing the specific diagnosis right away isn’t necessarily as important as nailing down, ‘Do I need a health care provider?'”
Besides, Husain adds, diagnosis is what doctors are made for.
“Symptoms checkers shouldn’t be for getting that final diagnosis,” he says. “We spend upwards of seven years in medical school and residency to figure out how to diagnosis effectively and an application isn’t going to replace that.”
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