McExistence

Perhaps, in the end, it will be the ability to create unmistakable features of consciousness in some stuff other than a biological brain that will signal success in the quest for an explanation. But it’s doubtful that experimentally exposing consciousness as not exclusively human will displace humankind’s belief in its own primacy. People will probably always believe that it can only be the strange loop of human consciousness that makes the world go ’round.

- Tom Siegfried, “Self as Symbol”, http://www.sciencenews.org/view/home

Recent academic research suggests that counts of Internet searches for certain words or phrases can predict some macroeconomic data releases. In this post, we show that Internet search counts can also predict some financial market data releases, as well as future price movements in some financial markets.

-

Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Forecasting with Internet Search Data

Though this system is not perfect, I am interested to hear the reaction from efficient market theorists on this. Some hedge fund managers are increasingly reliant on this type of market sentiment analysis - can it work for the typical retail investor as well?

More information ought to be useful, but only if companies can interpret it. And workers are already overloaded: 62% of them say that the quality of what they do is hampered because they cannot make sense of the data they already have, according to Capgemini, a consultancy. This will only get worse: the data deluge is expected to grow more than 40 times by 2020.

-

The Economist: Too much buzz

Thoughtful analysis on social media and its potential - for good and bad. With evermore noise in the social media space (especially Twitter), how will consumers and brands/companies/etc. be able to connect?