Tito's Blog

IMF Data Mapper

IMF released a nice visualization tool: IMF DataMapper.

Source: ZeroHedge

Financial Data Golden Goose

I really like the idea of Data Marketplace, a startup setting up a marketplace for structured data. Financial data is a golden goose yet to be disrupted by the internet forces …

Other interesting ventures in the “structured” data, more or less inspired by the Wikipedia model, are www.freebase.com and www.factual.com

Techcrunch coverage: YC-Funded Data Marketplace Is An Amazon For Structured Information.

A Long Term View

Interesting graphs that compare the current Great Recession with previous post-war recessions and the Great Depression are available at Quarterly Update: The Recession in Historical Context (pdf) by the Council on Foreign Releations.

Bayes Rules

I am a believer in the power of simple Bayesian statistics as a way to model the complexity of the world.

In the past two days I read two very interesting papers on the application of Bayes theorem to the semantic web and machine translation at The Unreasonable Effectivenes of Data and Introduction to Statistical Machine Translation.

Finally, here is Paul Graham’s original essay on a Bayesian approach to spam filtering, that spurred my initial interest.

Data Methods & Health

This is a hint to the possibilities: Google Flu Trends

Searches of flu are a more timely metrics than medical reports.