Within International Business Machines Corp., Robert W. Moffat Jr. was known as a “quintessential IBMer,” rising to Big Blue’s top echelons by relentlessly cutting costs to boost profits. To the rest of the world, he is becoming known as one of the highest-ranking executives to be embroiled in an insider-trading scandal since Wall Street was rocked by such schemes in the 1980s.

The 53-year-old IBM (IBM) veteran, a senior vice president and a close confidant of IBM Chief Executive Samuel Palmisano, was arrested last week and accused of leaking sensitive data as part of an insider-trading ring that prosecutors say is the biggest in a generation.

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I have been called the devil by strangers and “the Facilitator” by friends. It’s not uncommon for people, when I tell them what I used to do, to ask if I feel guilty. I do, somewhat, and it nags at me. When I put it out of mind, it inevitably resurfaces, like a shipwreck at low tide.

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Semiconductor luminaries honored at a black-tie ceremony in Silicon Valley Saturday night didn’t get a lot of time on stage. Most posed a few seconds for a photo with their award, said a few words about how honored they were, and left the stage. Andy Grove couldn’t resist doing a little more, including comparing commerce in patents to the actions that brought down Wall Street.

Intel’s (INTC) former chief executive and chairman was given a lifetime achievement award by the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame. The group helped celebrate the 50-year history of the semiconductor by inducting 15 chip innovators Saturday, along with a description of their seminal patent and its number.

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A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists–even Wall Street quants–have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li’s work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut–determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related–and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.

For five years, Li’s formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

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For the past few Februaries, Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer makes the trek to Wall Street to provide analysts with an annual “Strategic Update” overview, in which he covers the areas where Microsoft plans to invest and why.

This year, during his Feb. 24 update, Ballmer was more about circling the wagons than staking out new, far-flung territories Microsoft planned to conquer in the next 10 years.

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Like Napoleon marching into an abandoned Moscow, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have led Google’s advance into traditional advertising only to find nothing to loot. Now begins Google’s long imperial retreat, starting with 40 layoffs.

Susan Wojcicki, the millionaire sister-in-law of Brin who also holds a management role in the company, announced the job cuts in a blog post, as she laid out plans for Google (GOOG) to exit the business of brokering radio ads, a business it entered in 2006 when it bought dMarc Broadcasting for $102 million.

Up to 40 Googlers will lose their jobs, a small percentage of the 20,000 remaining employees at the search giant. But the real cut here is to Google’s ambitions.

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Before the last of Wall Street gets sold off as day-old fish on Fulton Street or washed into the East River altogether, it’s worth asking, what is Wall Street these days anyway? Thanks to Dick Grasso and CNBC, most of us think of Wall Street as balding men in ugly solid-colored suits yelling at each other and throwing litter on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Not even close.

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Until this week, most technology companies seemed to be weathering the meltdown on Wall Street. But Monday’s sharp selloff on tech shares–which pushed the Nasdaq to its lowest level in more than three years–shows that the ripple effects of the crisis in the financial sector and the near-collapse of the credit markets are being felt. Even Silicon Valley A-list players such as Apple Inc. and Google Inc. were tossed about like small row boats in the wake of a giant oil tanker.

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A funny thing has been happening to Google lately. Have you noticed? It’s going up!

And I’m not talking about the one-day pop it got from those surprisingly good earnings, which shocked just about everyone on Wall Street and sent Google shares soaring.

I’m talking about the day-to-day creep-up, the steady momentum, the renewed interest in a company that never deserved to be on the outs to begin with.

The parallels to Apple are pretty striking.

Yes, the two are in decidedly different industries, but the status they enjoy in their respective industries is pretty striking. They are each the single, exciting brand, doing innovative things, controlling their markets, owning the buzz.

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A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a weekend piece entitled “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop,” which focused on the stressful nature of blogging. Using our friend Marc Orchant’s death and Om Malik’s heart attack as examples, Matt Richtel built a case for Web journalism as the cause of certain health woes because of its non-stop, 24/7 real-time nature. There is no doubt that news blogging is stressful. But it is not just blogging. Real-time anything is stressful. Take TV news, is Anderson Cooper not stressed? Looking more broadly, what about air traffic controllers or traders on Wall Street? Any human being who has to make decisions in real-time will be under a lot of stress.

The problem is much wider than the blogosphere. My wife, who works as a project manager for a large pharmaceutical company, is also under constant pressure. My dad, who at 60 had to switch jobs and became a mechanical engineer for a small company in Pennsylvania is always stressed too. The problem is not with blogging, the problem is with the real-time, as-fast-as-possible approach to things.

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