| Market Map |
Tired of staring at spreadsheets to get an overview of the stock market? Smart Money to the rescue! By breaking down the market into industry segments and visualizing market activity in a single, unified map it becomes easy to get an overview of the market and to discover trends visually. Don't just believe me, try it for yourself! |
| News Map |
Now that you know about Market Map, why not visualize news articles in the same way? Quickly find the big stories and discover the relative importance the media assigns to different news items. News Map uses Google News as its news source. And if you're fed up with fancy Flash visualizations, you may also find Week in Review refreshing. Hey, don't kill the messenger. |
| Kuro5hin |
Interested in what other people think about current events? Kuro5hin delivers technology and culture from the trenches. Lots of stories, lots of people, lots of opinions. |
| Slashdot |
Have you ever wondered where Linux geeks hang out to exchange technology-related news stories? Look no further! The verb "to slashdot" now officially refers to the herding behavior of nerds, often resulting in a crashed webserver because thousands of them attempt to access the same website simultaneously. Anthropologists would love these guys. |
| Memepool |
Need a catalog of some of the stranger places on the web? This is the perfect website to visit. And you thought you were the crazy one around here... far from it! |
| Craigslist |
Once a small-time Bay Area classified website, Craigslist has evolved into a highly popular community with global reach. From job listings over real estate sales to political discussions, this simple site is useful in many circumstances. No wonder eBay recently purchased Craigslist. |
| The Square |
This is a networking site for graduates of top tier schools. It includes a job section and many amusing discussion threads. I'm personally a big fan of their daily trivia. However, this bias may be due to the fact that I was ranked in the top 5 out of about 600 players in mid 2004. Winning is fun! |
| The Economist |
Need reliable news slowly? If you haven't already subscribed to the Economist, it's about time! This is simply the best news source around. The 24-hour news networks repeat the same garbage from dusk 'til dawn. Instead, read the Economist once a week to get a well-researched summary of world news and economic analysis. |
| Drudge |
Need unreliable news quickly? More interested in rumor than fact? The Drudge Report sometimes reports legitimate stories before anyone else (which could be useful to traders) but Matt doesn't have time to check facts. Beware of the pop-ups and the right-wing bias. |
| CIA Factbook |
This is the best source for detailed information about foreign countries. Just need to know the capital of Guyana or want to know the GDP of Lesotho? Either way, the CIA Factbook can give you all the stats. |
| Riddles |
William Wu, a fellow Berkeley grad, put together this excellent collection of riddles and interview questions. You'd be hard pressed to find a more complete list of puzzles. |
| Ponder This |
Every month the
guys at IBM's research labs post a new question. The
first 100 correct submissions get mentioned and at the
end of the month the correct answer is published. I've
solved a few of them recently and it has been quite fun! |
| Time & Date |
One would think that visitors of this website are smart enough to recognize the subtleties of time
zones. In fact, there is a famous incident where a knock-out option was hedged in the wrong time
zone and it ended up in the money for the buyer but because of the time-zone difference the
seller's offsetting position got knocked out on the last day. Well, despite the impressive raw
intelligence of my visitors, I still manage to receive calls at 3:30am. The moral of the story?
Visit this site
to make sure your intuition on time zones has any foundation in reality.
| Blackjack |
Counting cards is completely legal but frowned upon by casino owners. In his book "Bringing Down the House", Ben Mezrich describes the story of a group of MIT students who managed to make millions with their group counting method in the late 1990s. This is the homepage of Semyon Dukach, the real-life subject of the book. |
| Perl Golf |
This is truly one of the more amusing activities I've witnessed.
Basically, these poor souls conduct programming contests where the goal is to solve a problem with the
least number of characters. One of my colleagues challanged me to participate in one of the contests using
K. The top Perl entries came in at 41 and 42 characters. Needless to say that my K solution fit
comfortably into 20 characters.
| Google vs Books |
Google is great. But how does it stack up against time tested reference books in terms of speed of access and accuracy of information? This is an interesting experiment that should be repeated periodically. | | |
25 of october Profiting from U.S. presidential elections might just be the ultimate form of democratic capitalism. So when the media spin surrounding the 2004 elections started gaining momentum, I decided to join the politically inspired pollsters and bumper sticker peddlers in finding and exploiting the inefficiencies resulting from predicting election results. I suppose it should not have been surprising that the time tested Arbitrage Pricing Theorem was equally applicable in the political arena... 
4 of november Quantitative finance is a challenging subject. However, financial practitioners don't exactly go out of their way to make the topic more accessible to outsiders. One problem is the language barrier, separating quants from the rest of the world. The following article makes light of a profession that has a tendency to take itself too seriously. 
