Vizualization

This link has a very interesting (and beautiful) use of Internet data that looks at geotagged photos to determine movement patterns of tourists and locals in several cities of the world. The photos are constructed by Eric Fisher. I found through this post (hat tip to my wife for sending it to me!):

http://trendland.net/2010/10/20/eric-fischer-maps-photographs-of-locals-vs-tourists/#

The pic on the link above is for NY. For Barcelona it is amazing how different traffic is between the two (Red are tourists and Blue are the locals).

Like someone said in the comments, the compilations looks like a Pollock painting.

Stress is Bad for your Trading Account

I read this a couple of weeks ago in the FT and forgot to blog about it. Basically Phillips and ABN Amro are teaming up to develop a bracelet to be used by traders that displays a warning if their stress levels are too high. The idea here is that investors might follow irrational strategies if they cannot think properly and should take a brake if they get to stressed out before taking any decisions.

This reminds me of a paper by Andre Lo in which he measures physiological characteristics of traders (like blood pressure) during live real trading sessions and finds significant correlation between changes in cardiovascular variables and market volatility.

Here is a video of how it should work. It looks like really good sci-fi stuff. I wonder if it might help in other situations, like preparing to an interview, approaching girls, or right before some World Cup penalty shoot-out...

Cloud Computing and Data Loss

This is scary stuff, with T-Mobile potentially losing all personal data from its Sidekick customers due to a hardware fault.

I think I do a decent job of backing up the data in my office desktop and my laptop, having  two extra HD to store everything about once every couple of months (not to mention the usual syncing between home and work). I've had some friends and co-workers losing important data and losing a year of hard work with it.

With all the talk about cloud computing and firms using the web to outsource their software and storage needs, it is really scary to think how firms can be affected by losing important data, not to mention lawsuits if the firm also loses its customer's data.

I think that T-Mobile might be in trouble but given the small print in US disclaimers,its lawyers will are more than likely to find a way to avoid liability...