Stem in Current Events Information Technology

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Math and Information Technology

might be interested inpurchasing,based on the products youhave looked at or bought on the site.The National Security Agency of the U.S. government uses high-level algorithms to sift through the countless bits of data it tracks from communications across the globe in its search for global threats. Algorithms have taken on a new importance in the world of stock market trading. By programming information such as the price of a stock, its rise or fall in price, the number of shares traded, and other factors, a trader can develop an algorithm to automatically buy or sell stocks without the need for a human. Some market players, known as high-frequency traders, use algorithms to conduct millions of transactions per day, some- times buying and selling a stock in a few milliseconds. In fact, high-frequency trading often accounts for more than half of the entire daily volume of shares traded on the major U.S. stock exchanges. High-frequency trading got a lot of press for trig- gering the “flash crash” of May 6, 2010. In just moments, major stock market averages plummeted briefly to ridiculous prices before rapidly recovering. However, algorithms are also used for trading by many major investment banks, pension funds , and mutual funds.Algorithms can work not only as a short-term trading vehicle but also as a risk-management tool by removing the element of human emotion from trading. Encryption Encryption has been important to humanity ever since the de- velopment of the written word.The ancient Greeks and Romans used simple ciphers to transmit codedmessages.“Caesar’s Cipher,”