For the record, I'm male, mid 30's, and average looking.

Yes, absolutely. The best feeds (tightest spreads) are only given to specific clients who are requested to trade exclusively with them. If they detect you splitting your orders up between venues, they'll worsen your feed. The feed they'll send to public lit ECNs will generally be their worst (widest spread).

Unless you have a good high frequency predictor and low latency order management (you don't), you're going to experience adverse selection. Either because you're taking resting orders that HFTs are smart enough to avoid or because your resting orders get run over by informed traders.

This is very obvious in institutional FX. Pure "retail" flow will get quoted much tighter spreads by banks and market makwrs than you'll see on any ECN. Yes, it can get skweded against predictable flow, but a true "noise" trader won't be affected by that and will definitely be better off with tailored liquidity.

The fact that he left it running for years without finding the time to do anything with the data isn't that interesting.

Sure, progress will likely not be linear or without challenges, but we already have the human brain as proof that it is possible.

Seems like a referendum for a name change would be a good idea, considering the current typical usage of that term.

The search behavior is the same whether $foo is a popular generic term or something niche.

If your search for some specific term "$foo", nearly every result is just 'search site $bar for "$foo"', taking you to the site's search page, regardless of whether $foo is actually found on the site.

I'd guess that the racial and economic demographics of the particular schools in question are much more relevant.

Just curious what your suspicions were at the English conversation lounge and why it made you uncomfortable?